IN A bar at the edge of the French Quarter, Voltaire Casino, a 30-something teacher, sips a beer, sucks on a cigarette and discusses politics. Jazz is in the air and the ceiling is a haze of fumes: it is a picture New Orleans has sold to the world for decades. Yet soon the glowing red tips may be extinguished—or at least forced outside. After years of failing to ban smoking in bars and casinos across the state of Louisiana, campaigners have turned their attention to winning a municipal ban in the Big Easy. A local councilwoman has written a proposal: a vote is due by March.

Louisiana is far from the only holdout—and it has at least banned smoking in restaurants and offices. Across America, 24 states have not enacted full anti-smoking laws, banning smoking in restaurants, bars and workplaces, according to the American Non Smokers’ Rights Foundation, a pressure group. Most are in the South, where smoking rates are higher (see map). Nationally, 19% of Americans puff away, but in Louisiana 24% of adults do.

James Varney, a columnist on the Times- Picayune, a paper in New Orleans, argues that “end-of-the-line dives require a haze of cigarette smoke”, and that jazz musicians would never have looked so cool without their burning tabs in hand. Some bar owners say that they will be put out of business. A few local politicians worry pragmatically that revenue from the city’s many casinos will fall away if yellow-fingered gamblers cannot burn tobacco as they burn money.

Yet smokers themselves seem less than outraged. Mr Casino says that a ban in his favourite watering holes would be irksome, but “it’s not gonna stop me from drinking”. At another dive bar in the southwest of the city, Seth, a heavily tattooed smoker in a fleur-de-lis baseball cap, says that a ban “would hurt a little, I guess, but I’d just go outside”. In New Orleans, licensing laws are fairly loose: many bars run until dawn. If bar owners really were determined to allow people to smoke, it seems unlikely that a ban would stop them.

Already, in fact, non-smokers have plenty of places to go. Healthier Air For All, a Louisiana pressure group, lists over 100 joints in the city where drinkers can avoid returning home stinking of fumes. Indeed, many of the city’s best jazz bars operate with restaurant licences. Jazz fans these days are fairly likely to be prissy liberals with an aversion to death sticks. In the end, that will do for the city’s smoky culture as much as meddling government.