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Posted on 07/12/2003 10:57:11 AM PDT by microgood
My colleagues at Historylink.org breathed a sigh of relief (OK, a few may have hacked in relief) over the demise of a bill that would have banned smoking in the few public places where it's still legal to light up in Washington state.
Existing state law permits smoking in designated areas (call them puffer zones) in bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, skating rinks and other hospitality-oriented businesses. House Bill 1868, introduced in the last session of the Legislature by Rep. Joe McDermott, D-Seattle, would have amended the law to stipulate that "no person may smoke in a public place," period. The bill passed the House Health Care Committee by a two-vote margin in March, but later died quietly in the Rules Committee. A similar measure by Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell, did not advance to the floor, either.
The news was welcomed at Historylink, where sympathy for the iconoclastic runs even deeper than affection for Lady Nicotine. Historylink's weekly staff meetings are held in the bar across the street because it's the nearest available indoor space where the smokers can smoke. As a fringe benefit, the boss picks up the tab for libations and noshes.
The reprieve may be short-lived. According to a group called Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, there are more than 1,600 anti-smoking laws in effect in the United States right now and more are being adopted nearly every day. Four states and more than 50 municipalities have already outlawed smoking in virtually all buildings open to the public, including bars and nightclubs. Among them is New York City, home of the first cigarette factories in America, where 10-foot smoke rings once drifted lazily over Times Square from a famous billboard for Camels.
The act of lighting a cigarette is becoming something done either outdoors or in private, and even there smokers face restrictions. At least a dozen cities have banned smoking in public parks, on the grounds that any trace of tobacco smoke is a dangerous pollutant, even in the wide open spaces of a park; and, further, that children should be protected from the very sight of people smoking, lest they be corrupted by negative role models.
Even a smoker's own home is no longer a guaranteed sanctuary. In Utah, people can be ordered to stop smoking in their apartments or condominiums if their exhalations annoy their neighbors. A bill now pending in California would limit smoking in multifamily housing whether the neighbors complained or not.
"There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke," says Paul Knepprath, a lobbyist for the American Lung Association of California, repeating what has become a mantra for anti-smoking activists today. "We have a toxic pollutant that is wafting about and exposing people in their apartments or condos. We have to protect the health of people in these situations."
This is sheer hyperbole, powered by the same impulses that gave rise to and ultimately undermined the first organized campaign against cigarettes, one that began more than a century ago.
Then, as now, cigarette smokers were members of a beleaguered minority, scorned by middle-class America, suspected of bringing death and disease not only to themselves but to others. They faced discrimination in the courtroom, in the workplace and in daily life. In 1904, for example, a New York judge ordered a woman to jail for 30 days for smoking in front of her children. A few years later, a Seattle woman won a divorce on the grounds that her husband was "a cigarette fiend."
Cigarettes were legally restricted as well as socially stigmatized. By 1922, 15 states (beginning with Washington in 1893) had banned their sale altogether, and 22 other states had considered such legislation. Congress rejected several petitions to prohibit cigarettes at the federal level, but in 1892 the Senate Committee on Epidemic Diseases agreed that they were a public health hazard and urged the petitioners to seek remedies from the states. Decades before the surgeon general began putting health warnings on cigarettes, reformers proposed that each package of what were commonly called "coffin nails" be stamped with the word "poison," in capital letters above a skull and crossbones.
The first generation of anti-cigarette activists articulated virtually every issue still being debated about smoking, including the effects of "secondhand smoke" (a phrase in use as early as 1911). They differed from their modern counterparts primarily in the matter of emphasis. They gave more attention to reforming smokers than to protecting nonsmokers, and they spoke from a platform braced more by moralism than science.
Not that today's "antis" are free of moralism. They demonize cigarette manufacturers as "merchants of death" who have brought about a "tobacco holocaust." People who smoke cigarettes are "no less guilty of murder than serial killers, even though they only kill us slowly." Secondhand smoke "kills 53,000 nonsmokers a year" — the precision of the number hiding the imprecision of the science behind it.
While numerous studies show that secondhand smoke can cause short-term irritation and respiratory problems in nonsmokers, particularly children, evidence about its role in cancer, heart disease and other chronic diseases is equivocal and disputed. By using slogans such as, "If you can smell it, it can kill you," anti-smoking advocates run the risk of weakening their credibility with exaggeration and self-righteousness, just as their predecessors did.
One of the lessons to be learned from the first anti-cigarette campaign is that any successful reform movement carries within it the seeds of a backlash. Incessant warnings can fade into the ozone of the commonplace, ignored by those they are intended to reach. Furthermore, the more vigorous the attacks on cigarettes, the more attractive they become as symbols of rebellion and independence. It's not surprising that roughly one out of four adult Americans continues to smoke, a figure that has hardly budged since 1990, despite ever-higher taxes and ever-tighter restrictions on the advertising, promotion, sale and use of cigarettes.
Another lesson is that a cigarette is more than just a smoke: It is deeply entangled with larger social and political issues. The first wave of opposition toward cigarettes developed during a period of economic uncertainty and political turmoil, the result of a massive influx of immigrants, a shift from agriculture to industry as the basis of the economy and a corresponding shift of political power from the countryside to the cities. Most middle-class Americans were aware that their world was changing. The cigarette — a habit of people on the fringes of society — was a convenient focus for anxiety about those changes.
The world today is marked by an even more pronounced undercurrent of uneasiness, associated with an unsettled economy and increasing strains on education, health care and other social services — to say nothing of new fears about international terrorism. Cigarettes may catch the eye of the reform-minded in part because they appear to be more manageable than other problems. As one commentator put it a few years ago, "The mannerly middle class may not be able to outlaw assault weapons or rap music or violent movies, but it can shove smokers (usually the working class, the minorities and the young) into the pariah class, right next to the serial killers."
When the world seems out of control, you control what you can. It's certainly easier to pass a local no-smoking law than to challenge a federal government that is steadily retreating from air-pollution-control standards.
The cigarette is now the most vilified product available legally in the United States, blamed for the premature deaths of more than 440,000 Americans a year, besieged in the courts and banished from most public buildings. Given the tenor of the times, it may be only slightly farfetched to imagine the day when any remaining smokers will be required to wear the letter "S," in scarlet, while they slink around in search of illegal "smoke-easies."
Yet, the long history of tobacco in Western culture shows that prognostication is risky where smoking is concerned. A minister in Dayton, Ohio, was certain in 1882 that "the time is not far distant when the use of tobacco will be generally looked upon with disfavor and admit of no apology whatever." Forty years later, another writer was equally confident that "the cigarette smoker of the future is the leper of the future."
If it now seems as if such prophecies are coming to pass, it's useful to keep in mind another, voiced by an Italian physician who was one of the first to study the effects of smoking on tobacco workers: "This vice will always be condemned and always clung to." The date was 1713.
Still, it's probably safe to predict that Historylinkers will be able to repair to the bar and light up at will for at least the next two years, until the next session of the Legislature, when McDermott plans to reintroduce his bill to sweep the last vestiges of smoke from the public realm in Washington state.
Cassandra Tate is the author of "Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of the 'Little White Slaver.' " She holds a doctorate in history from the University of Washington.
FMCDH
FMCDH
yeah, yeah i know i need to quit, but i drive a truck and not much else to do while driving. One day i will make up my own mind and i don't need some goobermint official deciding what is good or bad for me.
I wish the tobacco companies would completely shut down for 6 months to a year and not sell any product within the borders of the U.S. I would love to see the pols squeal like little stuck pigs when their money dries up.
Good one!
I think I need a smoke. ;^)
Me too!
FMCDH
I'm nominating this for the quote of the day.
FMCDH
Oh, goody, let's all celebrate over-legislation. We need to limit sessions of Congress to no more than 30 days. Any longer than that and they start looking for something to do, which only leads to an abundance of silly and dubious laws.
Now there's a great idea!
They are not allowed to do that, as it would deny the states their blood money.
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