Smoke Gets in Your Eyes With This One : Purported anti-smoking initiative is a cover for tobacco lobby’s fight against local laws

Let the public beware: Professional signature gatherers are trying to qualify an initiative for the November ballot that purports to favor a “single, tough, uniform statewide law� to regulate smoking in restaurants. Uniform the new law would be, but only those given to delusions would believe that a measure backed by a tobacco company--Philip Morris Inc.--could possibly be tough. The initiative would in fact wipe out the approximately 270 effective local ordinances that limit or ban smoking in the workplace and in restaurants. Those measures enjoy broad public support and have the endorsement of most major health organizations.

In their place would go a weaker rule that would significantly roll back much of the progress that has lately been made to protect the nonsmoking public from the disease-promoting and even cumulatively fatal effects of tobacco smoke. The initiative is a deception, plain and simple, a fraud upon the public. No one who is concerned about public health could possibly support it.

Responding to complaints about the misleading claims made by the initiative’s advocates, acting Secretary of State Tony Miller has warned that deliberate misrepresentation of a measure’s contents in the course of gathering signatures is a crime that “will not be tolerated.� That warning may have been responsible for halting an expensive phone-bank operation that sought backing for the initiative by claiming that it would impose strict regulations on smoking in public places.

It hardly needs demonstrating that tobacco companies are not in the business of promoting anti-smoking measures. They make their money by selling cigarettes. One unfortunate marketing problem they face is that their product keeps killing off their clientele; as successive U.S. surgeons general have reminded us, smoking contributes to close to 500,000 American deaths each year from various cancers, heart disease, stroke and emphysema. So the demand for cigarettes has to be constantly bolstered. That’s harder to do, though, when smoking is actively discouraged by law, as it is with local bans or strict limits on smoking in restaurants and workplaces. That’s why the tobacco industry wants to override community rules with a statewide law that has been drafted to its own specifications, to serve its own interests.

Smoking kills, and any weakening of anti-smoking laws, however it may be disguised, shamefully abets needless deaths. The purported anti-smoking initiative is a sham, to be scorned and rejected.