North Carolina goes smoke-free. Why can’t we?
Time was when having a drink in a North Carolina bar meant having a cigarette, too — or at least inhaling a few coffin nails’ worth of tobacco smoke.
Times have changed.
The nation’s largest tobacco-producing state just became the latest state with a clean indoor air law. Beginning Jan. 1, it will be illegal to smoke inside North Carolina bars and restaurants. North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue signed the law in Raleigh, next door to Durham, the historic headquarters of Big Tobacco.
At the same time, city officials in Clayton were debating a proposal that would prohibit smoking in public places there. St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay has said that he wants to enact a similar law.
St. Louis-area officials have been saying that for at least 15 years, yet smoking still is allowed in most restaurants and bars on this side of the Mississippi River.
Meanwhile, Missouri is in no immediate danger of joining North Carolina, Illinois or any of the other 25 states with clean indoor air laws. A proposed smoking ban introduced by state Sen. Joan Bray, D-University City, never got out of committee before the Legislature adjourned on May 15.
Word was that suburban St. Louis city councils were meeting to discuss anti-smoking ordinances. Warning letters were dispatched quickly, reading in part:
“Our Public Issues Department is encouraging Smokers’ Rights Groups to protest. An important element in defeating these measures would be the participation of customers and smokers.”
That letter, from an anonymous employee of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, was dated July 24, 1990. It’s just one among millions of tobacco industry documents made public after lawsuits filed by state attorneys general were settled in 1998.
But while the geography has changed — the 1990 letter was written in response to proposed bans in Chesterfield and Brentwood — the playbook remains the same.
On May 12, Clayton’s Board of Aldermen heard bar and restaurant owners and their workers warn that a smoking ban would result in businesses closing. That’s the same message Big Tobacco was peddling back in 1990, along with now-discredited junk science questioning the health effects of secondhand smoke.
It’s the same line officials in North Carolina and Illinois and New York and South Dakota and every other state that already has approved clean indoor air laws have heard, too.
It wasn’t persuasive in those states, and it shouldn’t be persuasive here either.
The logic of restricting smoking in public places is undeniable. The overwhelming majority of people don’t smoke. They have the right to breathe clean air, not someone else’s dangerous and dirty tobacco smoke.
Smokers argue that markets, not the government, should dictate how business is conducted. It’s a specious argument. We don’t allow companies to spew poison into the air or water simply because they can make money doing it and their customers don’t object.
The U.S. Surgeon General reports that secondhand smoke kills about 38,000 people every year and sickens hundreds of thousands of others.
Restaurants and bars are among businesses that are least likely to provide health insurance to their employees, so when their workers get sick from the effects of secondhand smoke, the rest of us get stuck with the tab for their care.
Workplace smoking may be good for tobacco companies’ bottom lines, but it is hazardous to the rest of us. Non-smokers on Tobacco Road in North Carolina soon will have more rights than non-smokers in Missouri. This is crazy.
So, I am to believe, that given the majority of Missouri residents don’t smoke, that if we outlawed smoking in restaurants and bars, that business would decline. But if smoking was banned, wouldn’t this open up a larger market for these restaurants and bars? I do actually know of people who don’t go out on a regular basis specifically because smoking is now allowed.
Funny. I always thought it was a given of the business model to pursue the largest market possible. Oh well, dopey me.
Even disregarding that argument though, I’d like someone to tell me how business would fall in St. Louis-area restaurants and bars in the event of a state-wide smoking ban. Where would the smokers go? Illinois is not an option. Offhand, I’m not sure of the smoking-related laws in Missouri’s other bordering states, but I don’t see St. Louis residents driving there for a hassle-free, smoking-related weekend, regardless. The only other option is to stay home, and smokers have alleged that this is something they will do. But, as the majority of us know, most people don’t follow through on their claims, whatever they may be. Otherwise, fitness centers would go broke from their New Year’s resolution specials alone.
No, most people aren’t willing to expend the effort to stand by their principles. With most, talk is only hot air. But I am one person who would willingly put up with the hot air of smokers — all those scare tactics that they’re going to quit going out, after this one last weekend (`just wait, you’ll see’) — so long as their hot air doesn’t include smoke in it.
If smoking is banned, and the number of smokers declines over time, what tax will be levied to replace the current sin tax on smoking? If there are less smokers there will be less tax money.
Illinois is an option. The fanfare has worn off and after a severe winter, many small neighborhood bars ignore the ban. The compliance rate in my area of Chicago is probably around 30 percent. Chicago has a city ordinace against people congregating outside the bars. Local police are more into enforcing that ordiance instead of people smoking in a bar, bothering absoultly no one. The only complaints are from neighbors of the bars that comply
> North Carolina goes smoke-free. Why can’t we?
Other states have more restrictive laws against abortion. And Alaska has Sarah Palin for governor. I suspect the mere fact that another state has something doesn’t automatically create a mandate in the view of the Post-Dispatch, as your headline suggests.
In fact, in Missouri we are allowing businesses to decide if they will allow smoking, and what sort of accommodation they will make if they do. Many places are choosing to prohibit smoking entirely, while others allow it in the bar area. Blueberry Hill has a separately ventilated smoking room. And the casinos have ventilation systems so effective that you can sit next to a smoker and not smell the smoke.
The result is that everyone, smoker and non-smoker alike, has a broad range of options to suit their personal preference. I’m an ex-smoker, and hate smelling like smoke, so I rarely patronize places which permit smoking without proper filtration or ventilation. Still, I’m far from exhausting my dining options. And, I also appreciate the opportunity to smoke a cigar on a cold winter day, in the comfort of a neighborhood bar.
Missouri non-smokers have every right to dine in a smoke-free restaurant. They just don’t have the right to force business owners to run their business to suit their personal needs. Or to put it in the language of your editorial: Business owners on Tobacco Road in North Carolina soon will have fewer rights than those in Missouri. This is crazy.
Of course, for those of you who believe the government should be dictating personal choices regarding public health, this should only be the beginning. New York city has banned trans-fats in restaurant food. And some in Congress have suggested a substantial tax on soda. But why stop there? Soda, snack cakes, and chips provide no nutritional value, and contribute to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and elevated cholesterol. We could save far more lives by banning them than we would by prohibiting smoking in public. And if banning them is too much, we could at least stop subsidizing their consumption by poor people, by prohibiting their purchase with food stamps.
In reality, this “no smoking in public” is just the latest prohibitionist fad. Just as religious folks opposed evil liquor, today’s puritans rail against smoking. But at least the puritans of old didn’t try to find government programs on the very thing they sought to prohibit. That is truly insane.
FUND government programs. Why can’t this ($#)&*( thing have an edit feature?
The Post-Dispatch Editorial Board has lost credibility on this issue. You have assured the public and lawmakers that the Illinois smoking ban would not hurt Illinois casinos. But a new study by St. Louis Federal Reserve economists blames the smoking ban for a 20 percent decline in casino revenues in 2008.
The Post-Dispatch Editorial Board also recently promised that a smoking ban would cause the St. Louis heart attack rate to plummet. Yet a new study of national heart attack admissions and mortality by researchers from the RAND Corporation, the Congressional Budget Office, the University of Wisconsin, and Stanford University finds no evidence of any short-term effect of smoking bans. Heart attack rates are as likely to rise as to decline after the imposition of a smoking ban.
I hope the public will soon begin to doubt the 38,000 death toll as well.
Bill Hannegan talking about credibility? The house painter that always agrees with any argument the tobacco industry comes up with, regardless of his lack of training in the subject at hand?
That Illinois “study” was done by Michael Pakko, a former St. Louis Libertarian Party Chairman long discredited for taking benign data and mis-interpreting it to suit his political views.
As for that heart attack study, it only looked at short-term heart attack rates; it concluded nothing else about the countless other well-documented short-term and long-term health risks of secondhand smoke.
AJ… Exactly why we need to make the shift to the single-tax system proposed by Henry George.
The Post-Dispatch has lost credibility? That’s just priceless. The real loss of credibility sits on the shoulders of those who want to protect smoking, i.e., Kasoff and Hannegan. Bill, I noted a couple weeks ago in response to another of your ludicrous rants another responder asked you how you’d feel if we put this issue up to the voters. He said he was willing to take that chance. I agree with him completely but I didn’t see any response from you. Let’s put it up to the voters and see what they’d like to do on this issue; after all that would obviously be the most fair and democratic way to handle an issue such as this, don’t you think? That way you can’t blame the government for wading into your little smoke-filled brain?
Fred, two St. Louis Federal Reserve economists did the Illinois casino study.
The RAND study looked at hospitalization, mortality and heart attack rates.