ASH Questions Whether Calabasas Smoking Ban is Going Too Far

Where there's smoke...
People fired up over issue of lighting up in public

By Kim Lamb Gregory, kgregory@VenturaCountyStar.com
April 2, 2006

A controversy that's been smoldering for years is burning hot in our backyard right now, with a chain of events that affect smokers.

The American Lung Association of California is gathering signatures for a November ballot initiative that would raise the tobacco tax from its current 87 cents a pack to $2.60 a pack, with the revenue going toward smoking-prevention programs and healthcare.

But paying $6 for a pack of cigarettes isn't the only reason smokers feel they're being treated unfairly.

The state Assembly Labor and Employment Committee last week approved a bill that would expand the state's smoking ban by making it illegal to smoke in common-use areas such as parking garages and adjacent elevators and stairwells.

On Wednesday, thousands of young people across California and the nation will participate in the 11th annual Kick Butts Day. Sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Kick Butts Day is designed to fight tobacco use among kids. Simi Valley Knolls After School Club is one of the groups that will be observing the day. Club director Gloria Bowman said she plans to have the kids create cardboard masks.

"We do what we call ugly face masks," Bowman said. "They make it as ugly as they can so they know what they will look like if they smoke."

A satirical movie that burns both ends of the smoking versus nonsmoking issue, "Thank You for Smoking," opened Friday in Ventura County. The movie premiered in certain cities, including Los Angeles, on March 17, the very same day the city of Calabasas became the first in the country to implement a citywide ban on smoking.

Some people are ecstatic about Calabasas' trailblazing decision, whereas others believe the city has gone too far.

Ventura smoker Robert Best, 30, organized a protest called Boycott Calabasas, which he placed on a Web site for smokers' rights called The Smokers Club Inc., which is based out of New Hampshire.

"It's persecution of a minority," said Best, who enjoys cigarettes, cigars and the occasional pipe. "Right now smoking's not popular. In all of the world mostly, people don't give a damn, but here in California and New York City they're going to say: 'Go after these smokers! You don't have a right to harm me.'

"I'm not really harming you."

Smoker Laurence Norjean, 55, of Westlake Village concurs: "It's taken personal liberties and mandated them, almost like a police state," Norjean said.

But others, like Tracy Kimes, 45, of Westlake Village are pleased. Kimes, her husband and their two children, ages 6 and 8, lived in Calabasas before moving to Westlake Village.

"To me there's nothing worse than walking out of a restaurant and walking through a bunch of smoke," Kimes said. "Both my kids have allergies. One has asthma. After living in Calabasas 11 years, I'm thrilled it's now smoke-free."

Camarillo social psychologist Martin Kaplan, Ph.D., believes there is militancy on both sides because the smoking controversy raises an issue that has plagued America ever since the forefathers signed the U.S. Constitution.

"The issue of the collective well-being versus the individual is at the core of America," said Kaplan, who taught at California State University, Northridge, and now heads the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at California State University, Channel Islands. "We are founded on the basis of individual liberties. On the other hand, we also believe in the collective good."

Filtering both sides

Both sides of the smokers' rights versus public health issue are skewered in the satire "Thank You for Smoking," a tale about spin spun by Santa Barbara filmmaker Jason Reitman.

The tale centers on the character of Nick Naylor, head spokesman for Big Tobacco. Played by Aaron Eckhart, Naylor pays his mortgage by defending smokers' rights and tobacco companies against anti-smoking advocates and a sanctimonious senator from Vermont played by William H. Macy.

One of the most common questions the 28-year-old Reitman said he has gotten during the publicity rounds he has been making for the movie is, "Do you smoke?"

"The answer is no, I don't smoke," Reitman told the Detroit Free Press. "But I also don't want government or anybody else telling me how I ought to live. This movie isn't pro-smoking or pro-Big Tobacco. It's a stab at political correctness — or maybe more like a jab."

Near the end of "Thank You for Smoking," Reitman drives home the "slippery slope" point that has smokers concerned: Where does the government intervention end?

During one scene in the film, Naylor's rapid-fire mouth rat-a-tats a demand from the Vermont senator that cigarettes should carry a skull and crossbones on each pack. Well, then, Naylor argues, why not put a warning label on Vermont cheese? After all, it clogs your arteries.

"There's no such thing as somebody getting hurt from secondhand cheese," said Paul Knepprath, vice president of government relations for the Sacramento-based American Lung Association of California. "We know that secondhand smoke is a cancer-causing toxin. A class-A carcinogen. ' This is not the same thing as Big Macs or cheese or ice cream."

The findings are backed by numerous physicians and researchers, but Best and members of The Smokers Club Inc. are not convinced. They say many of these studies quoted by anti-smoking groups are fallible. "You can't actually prove secondhand smoke is dangerous except in a lab," Best said. "Smoke dissipates. I don't care if it's the fire on the hillside or the cigarette in my hand or the guy smoking pot in the bushes."

Besides, Best said, why target smokers when there's so much other bad stuff out there hanging in the air? "They're telling me, if I'm standing 20 feet away from you, you're getting all these horrible chemicals in your lungs," Best said. "I'm sorry but you're getting horrible chemicals in your lungs from cars ' from pesticides."

Human nature

"My kids would kill me if they saw me do this," said Norjean, a cigarette bobbing in his mouth as he flicked his lighter in a courtyard of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

Norjean, managing director and chief executive officer of Norstar Media Entertainment, has his editing facility in Calabasas. Besides not being happy with the citywide smoking ban, he believes the edict will have the opposite result of its intention. "It's not positive reinforcement; it's negative reinforcement," he said. "Negative reinforcement rarely works. The human spirit is such that if you tell someone they can't do something, they're going to do it."

Best agrees, pointing to the 1920s as an example. "When we did prohibition against alcohol, that didn't work," he said. "All it did was get the Mafia to start. We prohibited drugs. It failed. You can go (out) and get anything you want any time of day."

Best knows smoking isn't healthy and even tried to quit once, but no matter what he decides to do, it should be nobody's business but his, he said. "I'm pretty sure at some point in my life I'll want to quit," Best said. "I'm sure it will be very hard for me. But I'll make the decision.

"Even if I wanted to quit now, I'd probably keep smoking just because this happened," he said, referring to the Calabasas ban.

The ban has also brought out the rebel in lifetime smoker Helen Richards, 61, of Thousand Oaks.

"If I'm arrested in Calabasas, I don't want my husband to bail me out because I'll die first," she said.

Kaplan is not surprised by this reaction among smokers. He's not sure what the answer is to balancing individual rights with public safety, but does not believe this is the best way to go about it.

"One way you can't balance it is by Draconian measures, because all it does is bring up reactance," he said. "People don't respond well to force. Certainly Americans don't. We're pretty ornery folks."

Reactance, Kaplan said, is a term among social psychologists describing what happens when one group of folks feels oppressed by another — especially if they feel they've had no voice in the matter, or if the group they feel oppressed by is trying to shame them. "The arguments against smoking tend to say, 'You're stupid for doing it and you're endangering other people,' " Kaplan said.

Human nature is to bristle, he said, and start justifying their behavior any way they can. "Telling people their behavior is stupid or irrational or unhealthy for them is not going to get you anywhere," Kaplan said. "Smokers are not going to change their behavior in response to a law."

Shunning smokers

"Is this smoke bothering you?" Richards asked as she lit up an Eve Light 120 cigarette in her Thousand Oaks home.

Richards knows discourteous smokers, but she is not one of them, she said, and she's tired of being treated like a social leper. "I'm not proud to be a smoker, but I just want to be treated like a human being," she said. "Don't put 'criminal' across my forehead because I'm smoking a legal substance."

She is tired of having people wave dramatically in front of their faces or work up coughing spasms fit for a tuberculosis ward. "That's degrading," she said.

She knows smoking is bad for her health, but she believes it's keeping her from other health hazards.

"I'm 22 years sober. I'm not giving up everything." she said. "I quit smoking for two months once. In 30 days, I gained 30 pounds."

Norjean agreed that he's tired of being treated like a second-class citizen and said he questions the true motives of those who supported Calabasas' smoking ban.

"If they're doing it from an altruistic standpoint, that's one thing, but if it's, 'I don't do it so you can't do it either,' that's something else," Norjean said.

"Most of the anti-smokers are former smokers," said Best. "The nonsmokers tend to be more forgiving. It's the ex-smokers who are the most neurotic and the people who want you to quit and do what they did."

Knepprath does not condone the disrespectful treatment of smokers, and in fact said the American Lung Association offers many resources to help smokers quit. The motives of anti-smoking groups such as the American Lung Association are strictly tied to public health, he said.

"This issue has never been about rights. It's been about health," he said. "What Calabasas did and what other cities are contemplating ' it's all about protecting health. There is no constitutional right to smoke."

A smoker's decision to continue smoking affects all pocketbooks, Knepprath said. "Smoking costs California almost $16 billion a year and these are both direct and indirect medical costs, and lost productivity," he said.

"We're already paying for it," Best countered. "Half the price of a pack of cigarettes goes toward health things."

Because it touches on the fundamental societal conflict of the individual versus the greater good, Kaplan believes this is not a controversy that will be snuffed out easily. It's more likely to swing like a pendulum, decade after decade.

"It will keep swinging back and forth, back and forth," Kaplan said. "It's been doing that since 1787. This is just one more thing along the way."

Responses mixed over smoking ban
04/01/2006
Eric Leach
CALABASAS - Two weeks after the nation's toughest secondhand-smoke ban became law, Calabasas officials have received thousands of calls and e-mails from around the nations, including congratulations, complaints and even a hex.
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Ordinance to cause problems
March 30, 2006
The Calabasas smoking ordinance is far more flawed than it's been portrayed in the media. Smoking is prohibited whether or not others are harmed or even annoyed.
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Smoking Bans Move Outside
March 20, 2006
By Rush Limbaugh
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Outdoor Smoking Bans: Government lacks power to legislate lifestyles

March 21, 2006
Calabasas, California joined more than 700 cities across the country who have placed limits on outdoor smoking last week with one of the toughest smoking bans on the books.

Last week, the community of 25,000 people on the western fringes of Los Angeles outlawed smoking in all public places -- including restaurants, parks, bus stops and sidewalks -- by a unanimous vote. The Calabasas City Council will allow smoking in one's car or house as long as the windows are closed and no one nearby is being affected. Offenders face warnings, fines of up to $500 for repeat offenses and misdemeanor charges.

The law came just weeks after the California Air Resources Board declared second-hand smoke to be a toxic air contaminant that can lead to infections, lung cancer and death.

Proponents said this "groundbreaking public health law" will limit the harmful effects of second-hand smoke.

But located 27 miles west of Los Angeles, the smog capital of the country, maybe Calabasas community activists are targeting the wrong enemy. One individual's cigarette smoke is a miniscule fraction of the chemicals released from pollution, car exhaust and factory chemicals each day. There are much larger problems that deserve the attention of anti-smoking advocates.

By now, everyone knows smoking is bad for you, but the government does not have the right to legislate an individual's lifestyle choices.

Warnings from the Surgeon General decorate each pack of "cancer sticks," commercials from anti-smoking groups air repeatedly on many different television channels and most people aren't shy about reminding smokers of the detriments of nicotine and lung cancer.

Smokers get it, and it's their choice, not the government's.

Every citizen has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If a person who is informed of all the risk factors, chooses to put legal chemicals into their body, the government of Calabasas need only hold its breath and walk by.

And if you are standing on the sidewalk and someone's rogue cigarette smoke is getting in your eyes, walk away or tell them to move.

Nonsmokers are demanding that every public place accommodate their smoking preferences, while smokers are being denied every consideration.

It's time the government butts out.
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Excellent editorial on Calabasas' smoking ban. But before the ink has had time to dry on it, Antismokers are already complaining the ban doesn't go far enough.

Bill Godshall of Smoke Free Pennsylvania now complains, "Unfortunately for many involuntary smokers in Calabasas, the ordinance exempts many different locations, so people will still be exposed to tobacco smoke pollution in many locations. " and he then goes on to quote an LA Times article that notes, "The new rules exempt residences, backyards... (etc)"
( Read )

Godshall seems to be fondly echoing the founder of Action On Smoking and Health who proudly crowed, ""'Here we are literally reaching into the last
frontier -- right into the home... No longer can you argue, 'My home
is my castle. I've got the right to smoke.' " ( http://www.no-smoking.org/Feb06/02-21-06-4.html )

I think it's appropriate to follow those quotes with one final one while keeping smoking bans on streets and in bars in mind. This is from Supreme Court Justice William Douglas and it struck me as so powerful that I chose it as the closing quote for my book: "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of darkness. "

Michael J. McFadden
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"
Mid-Atlantic Regional Director of The Smoker's Club, Inc.
web page: http://pasan.thetruthisalie.com/
mailto: Cantiloper@aol.com

Smoking Ban Takes Effect, Indoors and Out
3/19/06 By JOHN M. BRODER
An ordinance in Calabasas, Calif., prohibits smoking in all public places where anyone might be exposed to secondhand smoke.
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Noses Become The Enforcers Against Smoke
3/19/06 By John Pomfret, Washington Post
Cities across the country have banned smoking in all kinds of places, but the upscale Southern California city of Calabasas is doing them all one better. On Friday, a city ordinance went into effect that prohibits smoking in any public area where others can smell cigarette, pipe or cigar smoke.
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Re: Second-hand Smoke Ban

An Open Letter to the People and Mayor of Calabasas

As we watched the news of your city's new smoking ban and witnessed your mayor and others touting the ban and relating many illnesses to second-hand tobacco smoke, we couldn't help but laughably notice how all of these people were either standing in, or surrounded by, freshly sprayed, chemically-laden lawns.

Obviously, the fungicides, herbicides and pesticides from these lawn-chemicals, constantly permeating the air and perpetually breathed in by your populace, are the preferred method of obtaining the cancers and illnesses your misguided resolution against tobacco so fearfully tries to protect you from.

As you carry these lawn chemicals into your homes on your shoes and clothing where they become a permanent addition to your toxic living space (as these chemicals don't break down indoors but merely build up in your carpets--contaminating you and your children and spreading eventually to your bedding, your skin, lungs and bloodstream), consider also the fact that it is the chemicals in many cigarettes which can cause the most harm to smokers, and today many tobacco products are without these chemical additives--some actually contain organic tobacco--which make them far less dangerous to non-smokers than your dull-witted crusaders would have everyone believe.

Of course a certain amount of protocol should be in place regarding second-hand smoke in confined areas where children are present or in restaurants and public buildings; but many bars should still have the choice whether to go smoke-free or not.

Further, regarding indoor contaminants: most commercially available household cleaners contain many more of these same toxic chemicals along with a variety of industrial solvents, which can cause most of the chronic and fatal illnesses among the population that your foolish crusaders seem to fear the most. Combine these with the constant out-gassing of chemicals from paints, varnishes, synthetic carpeting and furniture, glues, adhesives, and chemical perfumes and dyes and you'll begin to see that cigarettes are the least of your problems.

These are the real killers in our society, as evidenced by the death of Dana Reeves of lung cancer. It is not certain where she could have contracted such a disease, but it wasn't from second-hand smoke. Sort of makes your whole case a fallacy based on ignorance and fear.
Outside smoking? Don't be ridiculous. It's the chemicals, you idiots.

Steve Daniels
Cleveland, Ohio
March 18, 2006

Objects to mayor's stance on tobacco

Until I read Barry Groveman's opinion piece in The Acorn, I didn't realize that in addition to being mayor he is also the new self-appointed Surgeon General of Calabasas.

I have no doubt the numerous letters sent to The Acorn, along with this newspaper's editorial condemning the scope of the brutal smoking ban, prompted him to respond in this defense.

Did he propose to modify the law to address the civic liberties concerns of both the smoking and non-smoking voters? Of course not, because this new law was not about anyone's health concerns, but a convenient vehicle for him to pull a headline-grabbing political stunt. He quotes unsubstantiated statistics from unsubstantiated studies as justification in his opinion piece. If the legislature believed these so-called statistics were really valid, they would have immediately proposed the cessation of all tobacco sales in the state, as was done with asbestos and other dangerous substance.

I believe, like a great number of other voters, that anti-smoking regulations are necessary, up and to the point that they do not become dangerous to the health of individual liberty. Obviously Groveman and the other elected officials do not.

I call for the immediate modification of the anti-smoking law and if no corrective action is taken, I trust those of us who believe in civil liberty will send a strong message to those politicians responsible at the next election. Jerry Cutler Calabasas

Smoking Ban Moves Outdoors
Calabasas makes it illegal to light up in public spaces, with fines up to $500. Some residents breathe easier, but others just fume.
By Bob Pool, Times Staff Writer
March 18, 2006
As a pioneering public smoking ban went into effect Friday in Calabasas, enforcement came from a higher authority: Mother Nature.
A pouring rainstorm snuffed out renegade smokers' cigarettes and sent them scurrying for cover as security guards began issuing warnings at the town's main shopping center.
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A Coast City Bans Outdoor Smoking In Public Places
3/17/06 By Josh Gerstein
An anti-smoking crusader, John Banzhaf, flew in from Washington last month to praise Mr. Groveman and his colleagues as they adopted the first-in-the-nation prohibition.
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