It’s coming. In just over two months, the District’s bars will go smoke-free. Once the smokers are banished to the sidewalks outside their favorite watering holes, the District will have joined 18 states and 474 municipalities that have done the same. It was at the start of this year the D.C. Council definitively endorsed legislation mandating that bars and restaurants snuff out the smokers; the restaurants did so this April, and the bars will follow suit come January 2007.

While smokers and civil libertarians alike opposed the legislation, they seem to have quietly accepted that they’re either going to have to quit, invest in nicotine patches for those nights out, or spend more time outside. Until now. The Cato Institute, a prominent libertarian think-tank, recently published a rundown of why smoking bans are bad public policy. And even though the District’s march towards smoke-free bars proceeds forward, it bears revisiting the many arguments for why it may be a bad idea.