Educate, don't mandate
Corey Taule
October 8, 2009
Idaho Falls Post Register
Let's give credit to the Coalition for a Healthy Idaho, a consortium of businesses, medical professionals and educators that wants to protect the public from secondhand smoke.
The coalition presented some hard evidence this week concerning secondhand smoke in the Treasure Valley. It tested the air in 19 bars that allow smoking and found pollution inside was 36 times greater than outside. That equals a lot of lung butter for the folks who work in and frequent those establishments.
That coalition's findings are well-timed. Last month, a comprehensive study showed that American, Canadian and European cities implementing smoking bans had an average of 17 percent fewer heart attacks in the first year when compared with cities that did not implement a ban.
Preventing secondhand smoke from reaching innocent lungs is a worthy goal. Smoking is not just a vile habit, but an expensive one. Idaho taxpayers spend roughly $300 million per year to combat smoking-caused illnesses, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. That works out to $542 per household.
Nationally, the numbers are even more jarring -- $70.7 billion per year to the taxpayers, an average of $623 per household.
And so the question must be asked: Should Idaho expand its smoking ban to include bars, the one major group exempted?
We think not.
Rexburg Republican state Sen. Brent Hill, who championed Idaho's 2004 ban on smoking in most public places, left bars out of his bill for one very good reason. Children aren't allowed in them.
Hill's intentions were excellent and appropriate. He sought to protect innocent children from breathing harmful cigarette smoke in public places such as restaurants and around the entrances of large gathering places like shopping malls and hospitals.
Hill correctly assumed that adults frequenting places that don't allow minors could take care of themselves. Don't like smoke? Exercise your freedom not to frequent or work in places that allow it.
There is a great temptation, given the collective nature of our health care system, to try to convince people to live safer and healthier lives, and that's a good thing.
The coalition's study and the publicity surrounding it might convince some Idaho tavern owners to go smoke-free. We hope it does. Perhaps the fact that a reduction in heart attacks is now attributable to less secondhand smoke will motivate a few more.
So, we offer our hearty thanks to the coalition for the information it has provided, and we urge it to continue its educational efforts.
But cigarettes are a legal product. Bar owners have property rights. And freedom is a precious thing that should be jealously guarded.
Even if the freedom in question is the freedom to kill yourself.
Originally posted at http://www.postregister.com/story.php?accnum=1028-10082009&today=2009-10-08
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