Such amity reigned in this soon-to-be-outlaw joint in Chicago. A trio of women chatted over a laptop and drinks. Others WiFi’d while sipping juice Some read. I did, with coffee.

And nearly everyone was lighting up supposedly so unsocial an act that Illinois two days later banned it pretty much any public place indoors.

Actually, you’re still able to smoke in this convivial little lounge, Marshall McGearty’s, even though it’s now 2008 and the smoking ban is in effect. Opened about two years ago by RJ Reynolds Tobacco as a showcase for really expensive made-on-the-spot cigarettes, the place qualifies as a tobacco store, one of the ban’s few exceptions.

Only now you can’t be served anything but cigarettes. No coffee, no food, no juice, certainly no booze. Those things would make smoking more pleasurable and Illinois, like 21 other states, seems perversely insistent on severing smoking from pleasure.

The backers of the ban say it’s about health — second-hand smoke tarring the lungs of innocent barmaids. Health is the reason for the coincident ban on smoking in every bar and restaurant in France.

Though tell me: When ever has it been a good idea to mimic French policy? What next for Illinois, a Maginot line against invading Iowans? Actually, it would be refreshing to see some French-style resistance: “I’ll smoke where I please,” a Parisian waiter told a reporter Wednesday as he illegally lit up on the job.

That was, roughly, many Chicagoans’ attitude on their city’s 2006 ban on foie gras. A year later, the duck-liver delicacy was apparently widely available and rarely subject to fines.

Authorities say cigarettes are different. The ton of bricks is perched, ready to fall on violators. There’s no smoking in restaurants, in bars, or within 15 feet of their doors, windows, or air intakes, so no quick breaks out front, even if you’re so inclined on a seven-degree night.

No smoking even in casinos, either, which pleases the competition. “One of our advantages to Illinois is they, historically, seem to do everything wrong,” the head of the Indiana Gaming Commission, Ernest Yelton, said the other day. His state, for now, does not believe in so strict a separation of vices.

The ban’s backers say Illinois is doing everything right, that smoke-free is the future. Minnesota banned bar smoking in October, after which Governor Doyle of Wisconsin, who wants a ban for his state, warned that border-hopping nicotine addicts would make Wisconsin the “ashtray of the upper Midwest.”

In Marshall McGearty’s, they sell art-glass ashtrays, so that’s not as déclassé a future as the governor may want to imply. The cig lounge is a sort of contradiction to a lot of the received wisdom. When it opened, at least one learned critic suggested it would soon flop since it was set in the young-boho nexus of Wicker Park and, everyone knows, smokers are old, poor, and unfashionable. When I visited, I was, at 43, by at least 10 years the oldest person in the place. And nerdiest. And, apparently, the only nonsmoker.

The barmaids were smoking, too, pierced young tobacco-slaves that they were. Remember, they’re the rationale for the ban. Restaurants already accommodate the nonsmoking majority. Some ban smoking entirely. Some bars do, too, just the kind of market response you’d expect: Customers can choose. So antismoking crusaders must say they’re really fighting for the employees’ right to smokeless workplaces.

This may make some sense in restaurants — but taverns? For those aspiring to a mixological career, smoke is no surprise. As one Wisconsin bar owner just outside newly smokeless Winona, Minn., told a newspaper, “If you don’t like smoke, don’t get a job in a bar.”

McGearty’s, however, was one of the least smoky bars I’d ever been in. Espresso haunts have more haze. The place uses a top-notch ventilation system, a Reynolds spokesman says. Obviously, the company’s trying to prove that with adequate ducts a room can accommodate both smokers and breathers. It’s a point Illinois law no longer has any interest in hearing.

People will adapt. McGearty’s says it’ll tolerate BYO coffee — there’s a Starbucks down the street. One hookah lounge that had served food is opening a restaurant next door so patrons merely have to change addresses for a post-dinner pipe in what will, legally, be a tobacco shop. There’s always a way around.

There is, I acknowledge, because addiction moves smokers to find one. It’s a foul habit, yet one plainly hard to break. I’m glad I never acquired it, and I’d flip if my daughter moved to Chicago, got a Chinese ideogram tattooed on her neck, and took up Reynolds’s fancy smokes.

But I’d be as gravely disappointed if she became the kind of joyless hatchet-waver who felt it a glorious use of the law to command other consenting adults not to do it either.

That the ban descends to such absurdities as outlawing coffee in a smoking lounge makes it clear that its intent is to quash pleasure.

The aim is to make smoking solitary and, thus, marginal. “Smoking becomes something you have to interrupt your social activity to do,” one activist declared after Minnesota launched its ban. “Because of that, you just cut down more.” They do not hide their manipulations but exult in them. For a free society, this is a kind of political pollution that wreaks havoc well past the doors of the barroom.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.