Sunday, February 03, 2008
Smoking ban is a workplace safety issue
Dan Radmacher
Recent columns
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- Virginia voted for gridlock on Tuesday
- Project Vote Smart tries to educate Virginia voters
- America should listen to this Cassandra
From the RoundTable blog
When I first moved to Illinois to work at The Southern Illinoisan, a small newspaper in Carbondale, I was surprised to find that smoking in grocery stores was fairly common.
But not long after that 1990 move, Illinois strengthened its Clean Indoor Act to eliminate smoking in most public places. Restaurants could still have smoking areas and bars were excluded, but it was a giant leap forward.
This year, the Smoke Free Illinois act took effect, which essentially bans smoking in any enclosed buildings except private residences and tobacco shops.
In West Virginia, where I worked for 10 years, county boards of health were empowered to set smoking policies. In 1992, the Kanawha County Board of Health became the first to limit smoking in public places. By 2003, all 55 county boards of health had instituted some sort of smoking limit, and some counties had completely banned smoking indoors in public places.
The day before I moved to Florida in 2003, the state implemented a law banning smoking in restaurants and bars that made more than 10 percent of their revenue from food sales.
Sorry for the little employment history, but it seemed like a good way to illustrate how far behind the curve Virginia is when it comes to smoking in public places.
I know tobacco has a long history in Virginia. Philip Morris USA has its headquarters here. Many farmers still make their living growing the weed. Etc., etc.
You know what? It's time to get over all that. Tobacco is a deadly product. If I thought prohibition would be effective, I'd argue for that. Though making cigarettes illegal would certainly backfire, limiting the places where smoking is allowed has proven hugely successful in other states, both in protecting nonsmokers from secondhand smoke and in actually reducing the number of smokers.
It turns out if you have to go most of the day at work without a cigarette, it's a lot easier to quit. Most smokers, by the way, would quit if the product weren't so incredibly addictive.
That brings us to the failed attempts in recent years to pass a simple ban on smoking in Virginia restaurants. Currently, restaurants are only required to have no-smoking sections, but nothing says there has to be any genuine separation -- walls or separate ventilation systems, for instance -- between the sections.
That makes the requirement all but worthless. There's a certain wing restaurant in town I like to take my son to. But some days if there are a lot of smokers in the bar, I need to turn around unless I want my 3-year-old to walk out of there smelling like an ashtray.
There's nothing between the bar, where smoking is allowed, and the nonsmoking section except a waist-high wall. The ventilation system seems designed to spread the smoke around.
Some argue that we should let the free market decide the issue. There's nothing to stop restaurant owners from deciding to ban smoking in their own establishments. If smoking drives customers away, soon enough most restaurants will make the logical choice to go smoke-free.
But that would take too long, and would still leave many restaurants that allow smoking. To me, this is a workplace safety issue. Secondhand smoke is a known carcinogen. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates it kills about 50,000 Americans every year.
Employers cannot knowingly expose their workers to any other deadly toxin. Secondhand smoke should not be an exception. Workers should not have to choose between breathing someone else's cigarette smoke and making a living.
For that reason, I'm with Sen. George Barker, D-Fairfax County, a member of a subcommittee of the Senate Education and Health Committee that passed a bill that would ban smoking not just in restaurants but in all workplaces.
As Barker said, "This is a public health initiative. That's why I think it needs to be addressed broadly rather than more narrowly."
History suggests the bill pushed by Barker will face a tough reception in the Republican-controlled House. That body passed a bill last year that would have done away with the mandate for nonsmoking sections in restaurants in exchange for a requirement to post a sign at the entrance of restaurants where smoking is allowed.
But if House members view it, as Barker does, as a public health initiative rather than a property rights issue, perhaps they'll find the courage to buck the tobacco industry, and their leadership, and vote for the bill.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
