State Update
No Ban For Virginia
February 9, 2005
Saner heads prevailed in the Virginia Senate today…..on a vote of 26-14 the Senate rejected a total smoking ban based on the Delaware ban.
Senate kills public smoking bill
February 9, 2005
The Virginia Senate today killed 26-14 a bill that would restrict smoking in most public areas of the state.
The sponsor, Sen. Bill Mims, R-Loudoun, said the bill was needed to prevent second-hand smoke from harming children and the elderly.
Opponents said the bill amounted to “nannyism” and would restrict people’s choices.
http://www.timesdispatch.com/
Senate snuffs out bill restricting public smoking
Opponents say legislation to require separate, enclosed smoking areas in public places would infringe on rights of business owners and patrons.
February 9, 2005
By CHELYEN DAVIS
RICHMOND–With at least one senator arguing that he didn’t enjoy dining in a “sterile” environment, the state Senate yesterday killed a bill that would have limited smoking in public places.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Bill Mims, R-Loudoun, would have banned smoking in public buildings, except in areas that are either closed to the public or are separated from nonsmoking areas. For example, smoking would be permitted in bars of restaurants, as long as the bars were in separate and enclosed areas.
“This is not a ban on public smoking,” Mims said. “What this is is a recognition that both smokers and nonsmokers have rights.”
Mims read off a list of statistics about the health effects of secondhand smoke, and said a recent statewide poll showed 60 percent of Virginians favored his bill.
But other senators pointed out that businesses, restaurants and owners of other buildings are free to ban smoking in their buildings if they choose. Just last week the Strawberry Street Cafe, a popular restaurant in Richmond’s Fan district, voluntarily chose to become smoke-free.
Sen. John Watkins, R-Midlothian, who described himself as a former smoker, said Mims’ bill would have prohibited building owners from making that choice.
“This takes away the right of proprietors and owners of buildings to make decisions. This borders on nannyism,” Watkins said.
“Are we going to have a Yellow Pages that lists smoking and nonsmoking? We talk about individual freedoms. This goes over the limit.”
Mims argued that the General Assembly has a public health interest in whether smoking is allowed because “someone else’s choice hurts my health.”
“This is health legislation,” he said.
Sen. Charles Hawkins, R-Pittsylvania, another former smoker, said Mims’ bill would turn all bars and restaurants into sterile environments.
“The problem with this bill, it excludes those who enjoy going to a place that has a little more atmosphere,” Hawkins said. “There should be all types of choices in this commonwealth.”
The Senate voted 26-14 to kill the bill. Fredericksburg-area Sens. John Chichester, R-Northumberland, and Edd Houck, D-Spotsylvania, were among those voting against it.
Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple, D-Arlington, supported the bill.
“The only downside is someone might have to step outside to have a cigarette,” Whipple said. “Doesn’t seem like such a great sacrifice to me.”
To reach CHELYEN DAVIS: 804/782-9362 cdavis@freelancestar.com
http://www.fredericksburg.com/
Blowing smoke in Richmond
February 6, 2005
In Virginia, the arbiters of healthy living have moved that much closer to their envisioned responsibility-free society. The state Senate Education and Health Committee voted 8-7 Thursday on a bill that would outlaw smoking in nearly every public building and restaurant in the commonwealth. Yes, Virginians, that includes bars for happy-hour revelers and weekend celebrants. The Virginia Indoor Clean Air Act is far from passage, yet this kind of nanny-state politics can’t be stopped soon enough.
In states, cities and counties across the nation, lawmakers have bought into the idea that lifestyles can be regulated for the sake of public health. Against the powerful anti-smoking lobby, there are few who have shown the nerve it requires to challenge this argument. Those who do all too often are bludgeoned with sentimental arguments, like this one from the Virgina bill’s sponsor, Sen. William Mims: “Every Virginian has the right to breathe clean air, whether indoors or outside. It is time for Virginia to strengthen our laws to protect our citizens from harmful secondhand smoke.” What lawmaker wants to argue that no Virginian has the right to breathe clean air? Or rationally argue against the American Lung Association, which carelessly says that 53,000 people die each year from secondhand smoke?
Like many other liberal causes, the rationale to ban smoking in restaurants and bars rests on flimsy logic: Since smoking causes disease, those who breathe smoke will get sick. The anti-smoking lobby shoves dozens of epidemiological studies – those that profess to find correlations between various diseases and secondhand smoke – at the public, ginning up the myth that secondhand smoke causes cancer. Yet they ignore what science and health columnist Michael Fumento calls “the most exhaustive, longest running study” ever conducted on the matter. Published in 2003 in the British Medical Journal, the 39-year UCLA study of 35,561 Californians who had never smoked showed no “causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke [secondhand smoke] and tobacco-related mortality.”
This isn’t to suggest that hanging out at smokey bars is going to make you feel better. But when the science doesn’t support the legislation, lawmakers shouldn’t needlessly step in and take responsibility out of lifestyle choices. And anti-smoking advocates should rein in their demagoguery, such as when ALA spokeswoman Donna Reynolds gushed, “This is a great bill for the lungs, the hearts and the minds of all Virginians.” Allowing Virginians to decide what’s best for them is the proper role of government.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/
Pack Mentality: On Smoking in Public, the Legislature Should Butt Out
January 25, 2005
A. BARTON HINKLE
TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Ambrose Bierce missed an entry in his Devil’s Dictionary, where he could have defined “expectation” as “a disappointment-in-waiting.” Those who expect Virginia Republicans to uphold the principles of small-government conservatism find them- selves disappointed every year during the General Assembly, for a multiplicity of reasons.
Here is one of them: Senate Bill 1191, sponsored by Bill Mims. The measure would prohibit indoor smoking in most public places, including restaurants, bars, offices, and so on. It would permit certain exceptions – bars could allow smoking in separately enclosed areas with “Warning: Smoking Permitted” signs posted. Hotels could permit smoking in some rooms, as long as they did not exceed 25 percent of the total. Businesses could allow smoking in hermetically sealed chambers accessible by teleportation. (Well, something like that.)
With drinking on the street also generally verboten, and not every bar capable of accommodating separate smoking rooms, the Commonwealth faces, among others, the ludicrous possibility of patrons straddling establishment doorways – a beverage in one hand on the inside, and a ciggie in the other hand outside.
Mims’ proposal enjoys the support of a majority of Virginians, if a poll sponsored by a group of public-health groups is to be believed. Last week the coalition released survey results showing 43 percent strongly favoring a ban on smoking in public, and 16 percent somewhat favoring it. If majority rule carried every issue, then there the matter would end. But majority rule does not always hold sway, and in some cases – prayer in school, restrictions on the press, and the Mirandizing of criminal suspects, to cite but three examples – it is flatly irrelevant.
AGITATORS for a smoking ban might reply that those examples involve constitutional rights, and the Constitution does not anywhere include the right to drag on a coffin nail in the presence of others (sticklers could cite the Ninth Amendment, but let’s not get into that now). It’s a fair point; smoking in public does not rise to the level of a right. Then again, neither does non-smoking.
Yet on this question one sees a welter of confusion. The poll results show 77 percent of those asked believe “the right of customers and employees to breathe clean air in restaurants” is more important than “the rights of smokers to smoke inside restaurants.” This is sheer babble.
Properly considered, a right is a trump card that outweighs all other considerations, including majority opinion and the public good. (Abortion, gun ownership, free expression, and many other rights have been exercised unwisely, with sometimes dreadful results. Yet they remain inviolate.) While people might value some rights more than others for purely personal reasons, one genuine right cannot be considered more important than another genuine right: All rights are, by definition, inalienable. To say otherwise is to suggest something other than rights is at issue.
IN POINT of fact, customers and workers do not have the right to breathe clean air, and smokers do not have the right to smoke, because neither of them owns the establishment in question. The only person who has the right to decide the smoking question is the proprietor. As matters now stand, any bar or restaurant – or store or other business – can prohibit smoking, or set aside non-smoking areas, according to the owner’s wishes. Mims’ bill would stomp on owners’ rights to set the rules for their own places of business in order to honor the mere preferences of others.
For that is really what’s at stake: the preference of some not to eat or do business where other people are smoking. In this it resembles, say, the desire not to dine where loudspeakers are blasting ear-splitting rock music. Or the desire for vegetarian food. Or the preference for good service over low prices, or vice versa.
And the proper place to sort out those preferences is the marketplace, not the legislative hall. Smart businesses respond to customer demand, as anyone who has noticed the profusion of low-carb menu items can attest. Smoking grows less and less acceptable every day, and the passage of time likely will achieve the purpose that Mims’ bill seeks.
In the meantime people who like to smoke should be able to seek out places where they are allowed to do so, and people who object to smoke should be able to seek out places where smoking is forbidden. Business owners ought to be able to seek their own market niche, and let everyone sort himself or herself out.
Public-health advocates will object that even second-hand smoke is very, very bad – deadly, in fact, over time – and patrons should not be forced to put up with it. Thus we go back to the main point of this screed: No one is forcing them (or employees, for that matter) to do so. They can find another place to eat or work, or they can complain to the management. If enough people complain, then the business probably will alter its policy. But it shouldn’t be forced to do so by legislative fiat. Here in what’s left of this land of liberty, the law ought to say only “live and let live – or die, as the case may be.”
http://www.timesdispatch.com/
