United States

^{Where There's Smoke}

There's fire these days, as the crusade against public puffing heats up

AT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, which has a keen sense of law-and-order. smokers now retreat to the photocopy ing rooms in order to relax with a soothing cigarette. And how does that affect working conditions? "We don't do any work here anyway," cracks one bureaucrat. At the Department of Transportation, where things are supposed to move, smokers can puff away in half the rest rooms and corridors, but at the State Department, which has never been known for -hasty decision making, nobody is quite sure where you can do it. "The air hasn't circulated in here in 20 years," sighs an inhabitant of Foggy Bottom who has not stopped lighting up. And at the Internal Revenue Service they are still trying to figure out what to do about both W-4 forms and cigarettes. Says an IRS watcher: "They always smoked compulsively over there."

Thus the entire U.S. Government last week lurched into the era of the no-smoking sign. Although each agency head is authorized to designate certain areas for smoking — hence the confusion — new rules from the General Services Administration now restrict all smoking by the 890,000 federal employees in 6,800 federal buildings. The GSA joined what has become a nationwide crusade against smoking, particularly smoking in public. Indeed, not since Prohibition has the U.S. seen such a widespread attempt to change people's personal habits by regulation. .. .

What accounts for such a fast-rising crusade against an activity that was once considered sophisticated and until recently had at least been politely tolerated? One thing that hap­pened was that Betty Carnes, an ornithologist, returned home from a 1969 expedition and found that her best friend, a 29-year-old mother of two, was dying of lung cancer. Her last request to Carnes was to "try to make people aware of the dangers of smoking."

Carnes helped persuade the commercial air carriers to begin segregating smokers in the early '70s. In 1973 she spear-headed a move­ment that prodded the Arizona legislature to pass the first state law limiting smoking in public places. "The time was right," she says now. "People w.ere becoming health con­scious. Only thing was the majority of the nonsmokers were afraid to speak out: they thought they were in the minority."

Today the leading antismoking crusader is Dr. C. Everett Koop, the bearded U.S. Surgeon General, who in 1984 called for a smoke-free society. Last December he pro­claimed that smokers were hurting not just themselves but their nonsmoking neighbors, and cited studies indicating that "sidestream" smoke can be harmful to others. The evidence "clearly documents that nonsmokers are placed at increased risk for developing disease as the result of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke," he said. "The Koop report added enormous impact because it establishes the rationale for corporate liability,' says John Pinney, director of the Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior and Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Tobacco is a dangerous substance, and an employer who doesn't do anything is likely to be sued." Says Koop: "We're sort of on a roll. When we first started talking about a smoke-free society, half the country smoked. Today only 29.9% smoke, and of those, 87% want to quit."

Leaders of the crusade argue that govern­ment involvement is legitimate because the health of nonsmokers is at stake. "It's mis­guided to think that this is about rights at all," says Mark Pertschuk, the legislative director of Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, and adds, "I even regret the name of my own organization."

Still, smokers are beginning to feel that they are a persecuted minority. . . .

Courtesy of the American Lung Association

Prohibition: the period (1920-33) during which a law was enforced in the U.S., which forbade the manufacture, transportation, sale, and possession of alcoholic beverages.

Chicano: used of a Mexican American person.

L25

_{PART C Exercises}