Where There's Smoke There's fire

By Otto Friedrich

At the Department of Justice, which has a keen sense of law-and-order, smokers now retreat to the photocopying 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.

All in all, some 40 states now restrict smoking in public places; 33 prohibit it in trains, buses, streetcars or subways; 17 forbid it in offices and other workplaces. There are also about 800 local ordinances against tobacco. The restrictions vary widely. Utah, for example, bars cigarette advertising on billboards, and Maine forbids smoking in covered bridges. But every week brings new rules and new tightening of old rules:

-- The New York State public-health council this month issued one of the nation's toughest antismoking measures. As of May 7, smoking will be forbidden in most areas of public buildings, including stores, banks, schools, hospitals and offices, as well as in taxis and limousines. Restaurants with seating for more than 50 customers will have to provide a no-smoking area of up to 70% of capacity. (Bars, however, can retain their smoky ambience.) Says Council Chairman Morton P. Hyman, a reformed two-pack-a-day smoker: "We hope to save lives."

-- In Cambridge, Mass., smoking will be banned as of March 9 in just about all public buildings. Restaurants and nightclubs with room for more than 75 people must designate special smoking areas.

-- The Beverly Hills city council this week is expected to pass an ordinance that will completely ban smoking in restaurants. Proponents argue that people from surrounding areas will flock to the smoke-free eateries. But Mike Sims of the local Chamber of Commerce, which represents 74 restaurant owners, says the law is unnecessary: "Everyone recognizes the problems associated with smoking, but we've not had any complaints from the customers." Owners tried to substitute a voluntary plan that would require each restaurant to post its smoking policy and allow customers to decide which to patronize, but the council rejected that idea.

-- The Texas state legislature is expected to vote soon on a smoke-free indoor-air act that would limit public smoking throughout the state. Fourteen Texas cities and towns already have antismoking ordinances, says Ron Todd of the state health department, and "every day, almost, another one passes."

And there is more to come from Washington. Democratic Congressman Mike Synar of Oklahoma plans to introduce a bill this week that would ban all print advertising of cigarettes. (Congress banned cigarette ads from television and radio in 1970.) "This is the next natural step after labeling," he says. Others are not so sure. The tobacco industry notes that similar bans in other countries have not reduced consumption, and the American Civil Liberties Union argues that such a law would be unconstitutional. "As long as buying and using cigarettes is legal, the ban is a violation of the First Amendment," says the A.C.L.U.'s Washington legal director, Arthur Spitzer.

Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island introduced a bill this month to increase the federal excise tax on cigarettes from 16 cents to 32 cents. He estimates his bill would raise $9 billion over three years. Critics complain that such a tax is regressive, hitting mainly the poor. New Jersey's Democratic Senator Bill Bradley has proposed a narrower bill, disallowing advertising costs for tobacco products as a tax-deductible business expense, which he says would raise $2 billion over three years. A number of corporations have moved to curb smoking in the workplace. For example, Chicago's Northern Trust Bank last month announced a ban on all smoking by its 4,500 employees except in lounges. It offered stop-smoking clinics to the 25% of its employees who indulge. USG Corp., also based in Chicago, has said that it would dismiss any employee of its acoustical-plants who smoked on the job or even at home, a move that critics contend treads on shaky legal ground. According to a poll of its members taken last fall by the Administrative Management Society, 42% of the firms now have some kind of smoking policy, up from 16% in 1980.

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 spearheaded 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 were 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 who do, in fact, have some rights. Says one Boston woman who has no intention of quitting smoking: "This crusade about health spills over into 'I know what's best for you.' So what happens next? Do these experts, in the name of better health, make people eat fish instead of red meat?" Others object to the new government regulations on political grounds. "I hate to see a knee- jerk reaction develop so that anytime something happens society runs for a government regulation," says Boris Yavitz, a "tolerant ex-smoker" who is a professor at Columbia University Business School. "First you should try to exhaust volunteerism, exhaust persuasion, and I don't think we have gone that route yet." In Illinois, the Chamber of Commerce has so far successfully lobbied against a no-smoking bill on grounds of practicality. Says Leonard Day, the Chamber's manager of human resources: "Employers would go nuts trying to divide their work force, having to use a yardstick to make sure the distance between desks is right."

( But the rush to pass new legislation reflects a growing consensus that the rights of nonsmokers should take precedence over those of smokers. The laws have helped to reinforce what should be common courtesy: that smokers refrain from lighting up unless they have first considered whether their smoke might affect others. That in turn might dispel some of the unnecessary animosity that has entered the debate and restore an air of tolerance on both sides.

With reporting by Robert Ajemian/Boston and Anne Constable/Washington