Like the smell of cigarette smoke that gets in your clothes, a bill that would ban smoking in all restaurants and bars in the state can't get out of a House subcommittee.

For five weeks, the bill has either been scheduled for debate or has actually been debated. But it's still there.

Rep. Todd Rutherford, D-Columbia, the main sponsor of the bill, says, "Even in a subcommittee with no smokers sitting on it we've still got a tough time, so in full committee with several smokers I anticipate it being much tougher."

During debate Wednesday, subcommittee chair Rep. Phil Sinclair, R-Spartanburg, said even though he doesn't like being near a smoker in a restaurant, "I'm just not sure how far we ought to go to basically criminalize smoking by adults."

Fellow member Alan Clemmons, R-Myrtle Beach, said, "We shouldn't make South Carolina a nanny state, with regard to a business owner's decision to make a building smoke-free or not."

He moved to carry the bill over until next week. But Rep. Karl Allen, D-Greenville, wanted to pass it out so the full House Judiciary Committee could at least discuss it. But the subcommittee ran out of time and was required to adjourn before it could vote.

Rep. Walt McLeod, D-Little Mountain, is frustrated by the argument that it should be left up to businesses to decide whether they want to allow smoking.

"What we're talking about here is secondary smoke, which infects your lung. And it seems to me like the public health of our state should not be arbitrated by what the marketplace wants to do," he told the subcommittee.

Rep. Rutherford agrees that the state needs to take action and not leave it up to businesses.

"The calls that I've gotten from restaurants and from restaurants owners are saying, 'Look, if you don't do it, we can't, because we have smokers and they want to come in there and they want to be able to smoke and the law says that they can do that'," he says.

Columbia restaurant chain Lizard's Thicket went smoke-free on its own several years ago, president Bobby Williams says. He doesn't think the government should mandate what businesses should do, though.

"We would have a line out the door and then the smoking section would be empty. So it just made good sense to me that we could certainly have those people sitting down and eating our food. So we just made a business decision," he explains.

He got some complaints from smokers, but says overall business went up after the smoking ban.