As a physician who has devoted 21 years to advocacy in tobacco control, conducting research and publishing a number of studies on the hazards of secondhand smoke, it is not surprising that I favor a wide range of anti-smoking measures. But anti-smoking tactics adopted by some municipalities, companies and organizations do not serve smokers or the public. The methods are mean-spirited, unsupported by science and attempt to stamp out smoking by punishing and marginalizing smokers. They go too far.
The City Council in Calabasas, Calif., recently enacted an ordinance - supported by several anti-smoking groups - that bans smoking in just about all outdoor areas of the city, including streets and sidewalks, unless there is no other person within 20 feet.
The expressed purposes of the ordinance are to protect nonsmokers from exposure to secondhand smoke and to reduce “the potential for children to associate smoking and tobacco with a healthy lifestyle.”
The hazards of exposure to smoking in the workplace have been proven, but there is no scientific evidence that shows that small, transient exposures to secondhand smoke in outdoor areas - places where people can easily avoid prolonged exposure - represent any serious public health problem.
The argument that these policies are needed to prevent children from seeing people smoke in public would ostracize citizens for pursuing a legal activity. What comes next? Laws that ban fat people from the public square so that children won’t associate obesity with public acceptability? Laws that prohibit people from eating fast food in public so children won’t see this behavior and associate it with a healthy lifestyle?
Frustrated by its inability to outlaw smoking, this arm of the anti-smoking front seeks to outlaw smokers. I’m all for efforts that make smoking seem less glamorous, desirable or cool, but it is wrong to restrict people’s rights because you do not like what they do.
Equally disturbing is another trend applauded by the anti-smoking movement that would have employers fire or refuse to hire smokers. According to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), a Washington, D.C.-based anti-smoking organization: “Firing smokers is an appropriate and very effective way to stop burdening the great majority of employees who wisely chose not to smoke with the enormous unnecessary costs of smoking by their fellow employees.”
Michigan-based Weyco Inc., announced a policy of denying employment to smokers last year, and it has been followed by the World Health Organization, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Crown Laboratories, the city of Melbourne, Fla., and Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Mo.
ASH, along with these employers, argues that these policies are appropriate because they will reduce the increased health care costs associated with smoking. But what they also do is make smokers second-class citizens, depriving them of the right to make a living to support themselves and their families.
Is ASH serious? Should smokers not be allowed to hold jobs? Does it somehow promote public health to make the families of smokers go hungry? Should our society have two distinct classes, one that can work and another which cannot, simply because of a lawful, off-the-job behavior?
An appropriate public health policy for work-site health promotion would provide smoking employees with smoking-cessation programs, not fire them.
I fear that the anti-smoking movement is on the verge of running amok. Ultimately, what is at stake is the credibility of the tobacco-control movement, as well as the integrity of its evidence-based approach to the protection of the public’s health. If we lose that, then the truly legitimate, science-based aspects of tobacco control will be undermined. And then it will become difficult, if not impossible, to advance any policies to protect the public from the hazards of tobacco.
Michael Siegel is a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health. As You Were Saying is a Herald feature. We invite readers to contribute pieces of no more than 600 words. Mail to the Boston Herald, P.O. Box 55843, Boston, MA 02205-5843,
Read
