It blows my mind that the U.S. has gotten to a point where the owner of a private business can't allow smoking in his/her own establishment. If you don't like it, go somewhere else
Not that easy.
If there's public access to some place (including not only restaurants but also offices), there probably should be a dedicated place for smokers.
But the laws ruling smokers and non smokers cohabitation can be somewhat excessive.
In Spain, smoking is forbidden in public gardens, and in the street at some distance (i don’t remember it exactly) from schools.
In France, smoking is only allowed in public accessible places if some dedicated space including costly ventilation equipments exists; non-smokers have prosecuted restaurants providing outside smoking places because…they were not entirely closed, and most establishments are not able to abide by this law (either because the equipments are very expensive, either because there’s some physical impossibility to create such a space in existing structures).
This situation also leaded, altough i don’t care myself for not going there, to financial difficulties in most casinos (and therefore significative tax losses, everyone knows that the only winner in casino is the state).
People in offices even complained about “favoritism” and “lack of productivity” of some workers going out of the building for a smoking pause, not taking of course into account the “lack of productivity” due to some of the complainers themselves busy at drinking coffee or spending their time with their private mail, social networks or internet games during work hours.
Concerning the obvious cost of tobacco addiction (but what about illicit drugs, alcohol, overweight…?), and without even any lobbying, the very large tobacco taxes in France directly go to the state, while the health cost (excepting the infrastuctures costs like building hospitals) are mostly supported by wages paid on workers income both from these workers and from the company they are working for: the arithmetical result is very favorable for the state and keeps it, along with political reasons (smokers vote) and economical reasons (France is a producer not only of wine, but to a lesser extent of tobacco) to fight against tobacco and alcohol addictions.
This being said, as in every matter, excess of law is no law, and i don’t see why people (including myself) shouldn’t be allowed to kill themselves with tobacco as long as they don’t bother others in closed spaces in the same way that people are allowed to kill themselves eating too much and too fat:
in “northern countries” (i know, Bhutan is not one), the cardio-vascular morbidity and mortality relevant to smoking must be compared to the one due to obesity and sedentarity, while in “southern countries” (and by extension Bhutan), the global health situation probably makes that the prime killer is not tobacco, not only because it is expensive, but sadly enough third world diseases including banal measles or gastro-enteritis without even speaking, like in Bengladesh, of environmental factors (arsenical contamination), of malaria and of endemic parasitical pathologies (filariasis…), and of “social saturnism” (intoxication by Kalashnikov lead bullets).