NY Observations and Information
Two Tobacconist Associations Join to Fight Proposed Smoking Ban Extension
New York, New York October 11, 2010 – The International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association is joining forces with the New York Tobacconist Association to fight for the rights of New York City citizens in opposition to the proposed expansion of smoking restrictions to the city’s parks and beaches and other public outdoor locations, including Times Square.
The associations represent thousands of small, family-owned retail businesses specializing in the sale of premium cigars, pipes, tobacco and related accoutrements.
The New York Tobacconist Association is circulating a petition which states that the undersigned are opposed to such an extension, that such decisions should be left to individuals, and that they pledge to be courteous in the use of tobacco products in those public areas. (http://bit.ly/9sIVfT)
The Association is also inviting supporters to attend the Council’s hearing on the matter Thursday, October 14 at 1:00 p.m. (http://bit.ly/beT6Sz).
“We’re against legislated smoking bans of any kind,” said Chris McCalla, legislative director for the IPCPR, “and so should everyone else, because they take away fundamental rights of citizens everywhere. In public places like these, common courtesy should prevail, not heavy-handed, misguided legislation.”
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Contact:
Tony Tortorici
678/493-0313
tony@tortoricipr.com
New “Transit Museum Annex” exhibit features 19 vintage smoking pipes dating back to the 1600s uncovered at the South Ferry Terminal construction site
Where New York Began:
Archeology at the South Ferry Terminal
New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex
Grand Central Terminal
March 18-July 5, 2010
Construction in New York City is always complex, but it raises particular concerns when it cuts through the most archeologically rich section of town. In February 2009 a new South Ferry subway station opened on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, a place where environmental, historical, and commercial interests collide. In order to build the station, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) was required to conduct an archeological review and excavation. This provided an extraordinary glimpse into the very place that the modern city has its roots, and the basis of an exciting new exhibit at the New York Transit Museum. Where New York Began: Archeology at the South Ferry Terminal will be on view at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex and Store from March 18-July 5, 2010. Annex is open Mon. – Fri. 8 AM to 8 PM / Sat. & Sun. 10 AM to 6 PM. For additional information please call (718) 694-4915 or log onto www.mta.info/museum.
Blowing Smoke at a Ban
Dec. 31st, 2009
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA, NY Times
GIVE credit to the first guy to light up a cigarette inside GoldBar on a recent Saturday night: at least he was pretending to be discreet.
Between puffs, the smoker, a 30-something man with a tight T-shirt, a gold watch and a gym membership, slyly obscured his cigarette behind the knee-high table that held his $400 bottle of Belvedere, assorted mixers and a pack of Parliaments. In turn, the cocktail waitresses flanking the room — who, at 12:30 a.m., still outnumbered the patrons — pretended not to notice.
An hour later, there was no longer any need, or attempt, to be discreet. The tiny Lower East Side lounge, where the privilege to spend hundreds on a bottle of liquor is extended only to those fabulous enough to make it past the doormen, was packed and smelled unmistakably of cigarette smoke. One skinny woman in a miniskirt and black leggings perched on the back of a couch and lazily blew smoke at the ceiling; another held a cigarette overhead while dancing.
Clearly, Mayor Bloomberg didn’t make the guest list.
Six years after New York City passed a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, it is easier than ever to find smokers partying indoors like it’s 1999, or at least 2002. In November, Eater.com called it “the worst kept secret in New York nightlife” that “smoking is now allowed in numerous nightspots, specifically just about any and every lounge and club with a doorman and a rope.” A few weeks later, GuestofaGuest.com, a blog about New York clubs and bars, posted a “smoker’s guide to N.Y.C. nightlife.”
“Everyone looks the other way,” said Billy Gray, 25, a reporter for Guest of a Guest, who says that he knows precisely which high-end bars and lounges, most of them in the meatpacking district or Lower East Side, will let him smoke inside. Far from deterring smoking indoors, the ban simply adds an allure to it, said Mr. Gray, a half-pack-a-day smoker.
“It’s more of an illicit thrill now,” he said. “Like when you were a teenager and snuck a beer in your parents’ basement.”
Plenty of New York City bars have thumbed their noses at the smoking ban for as long as it has been the law. As early as 2004, The New York Times wrote about neighborhood bars that allowed friends and regulars to light up after closing time. In 2008, at the opening of the Libertine, a Todd English restaurant in the financial district, cigarette girls handed out free smokes that guests consumed liberally.
But corner bars that tolerate smoking have traditionally relied on flying too far below the radar to be noticed. By contrast, at expensive paparazzi-flanked nightclubs that appear in gossip columns, there seems to be a new brazenness.
Until the Beatrice Inn — once referred to as “a low-ceiling’d smokehut” by Gawker.com — was padlocked in April amid a flurry of building violations and mounting debt, Kirsten Dunst could be found almost nightly “perched on the counter behind the D.J. booth, smoking cigarettes and bopping her head around to her boyfriend’s tunes,” according to Observer.com, the Web site of The New York Observer. That report appeared in January, just days after the Beatrice received its third smoking citation from the department of health in six weeks.
Not that you have to be a celebrity. Pat Shea, a 22-year-old student, was smoking inside Avenue — which has hosted the likes of Justin Timberlake and Lindsay Lohan — at 9:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in November. Mr. Shea said he was on his way outside to smoke when a staff member told him not to bother.
“I asked the busboy where to smoke and he said, ‘Oh, people just light up in here,’ ” Mr. Shea said. “I saw other people do it and then I decided, Why not?”
On Yelp.com, comments posted by Kimberly K. summed up the thoughts of nonsmokers in an October review of Griffin, another high-end club in the meatpacking district: “I thought you weren’t allowed to smoke in nightclubs anymore,” she wrote. “It seemed anywhere I stood, or sat, the person next to me was lighting up and blowing it in my face.”
All that smoke hasn’t escaped the attention of the New York City health department. Citations for smoking in bars and restaurants went up 35 percent this summer, to 306 citations compared with 227 for the summer of 2008. In all of 2008 there were 632 violations, compared with 592 in 2007. (Neither Avenue nor Griffin has been cited by the health department for violating the smoking ban, but this reporter, on several visits to Avenue since it opened in June, found people smoking each time. One visit to Griffin in November revealed widespread smoking.)
Elliott Marcus, an associate commissioner of the health department, said that he knew where the trouble spots were. “It’s these high-end places for people who think that the rules don’t apply to them,” he said.
The department has increased late-night smoking patrols. Undercover investigators roam the meatpacking district, the Lower East Side and Astoria, Queens, in what Mr. Marcus called a “cat-and-mouse game.”
There is evidence that smoking bans outside New York City may also be losing their bite. USA Today reported last month that bars in Chicago and Honolulu as well as in Ohio and Virginia were openly defying bans.
Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have passed smoking bans that affect bars and restaurants. Smoking bans were popular a century ago but were all repealed by the late 1920s, according to Christopher Snowdon, the author of “Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking.” Most bans meet the same fate, Mr. Snowdon said: “They usually end with the same kind of passive resistance you see here.”
“Its just the fact that you have a habit that won’t go away,” he added.
That is a view shared by many New York City club owners. Eugene Remm, the owner of Tenjune, a club in the meatpacking district that has gained a reputation as smoker-friendly, said his staff always tells patrons to take the smoking outside. The problem, he said, is that they don’t always listen.
“You tell them to put it out and then 10 minutes later they light up again,” he said.
Tenjune received a citation for patrons’ smoking in December 2008, but has not been cited in 10 subsequent visits, the health department said. GoldBar has been cited for smoking violations three times in the same period. Jamie Mulholland, the owner, did not respond to requests for comment.
Many observers, including Mr. Marcus of the health department, blame the club owners for lax enforcement. Bar and restaurant owners were among the most vocal opponents of the ban before it was implemented, arguing that it would drive patrons outside and cut into their drink receipts.
It stands to reason that owners might be tempted to look the other way when well-paying customers begin lighting up.
But Noah Tepperberg, who is an owner of Avenue and Marquee, say that is far from the truth.
“I think you make more money if someone has to go out to smoke,” he said. “They’re going to finish their drink to go outside, then come inside and order another drink.”
Mr. Tepperberg scoffed at the idea that a busboy at Avenue had given Mr. Shea and his cigarette a green light. “There’s no way a busboy told him he could smoke inside the club,” he said. “Our staff gets fired if we don’t see them doing their job.”
Mike Satsky, an owner of a new meatpacking-district club called the Provocateur, in the Hotel Gansevoort, acknowledged that some owners did turn a blind eye. He described himself as vehemently antismoking and said he has clashed with business partners on the issue, specifically at Stereo, which closed in 2008.
“There was a ton of smoking over there,” he said. “Back then I had different partners, and let’s just say not everyone saw eye to eye on the issue.”
The same can be said of patrons. Amit Nizan, a 28-year-old marketing consultant, complained about friends who had been smoking inside Butter on a Monday night.
“My throat is scratchy today, and it’s not from anything I did,” she said the next morning.
Those who have become used to being able to go out without coming home smelling of smoke can take comfort in the words of Mr. Marcus. “Shame on these owners,” he said. “We’re going to pursue them and demonstrate that the rules do apply to everyone.”
Nightlife
Six Years After Ban, Smoking Returns to NYC’s Bars and Clubs
by Scott Solish
NYC: the city that never smokes
A proposal to ban lighting up in New York’s parks has exposed the puritanical agenda behind the crusade against smoking.
Basham and Luik
Patrick Basham and John Luik argued that tobacco displays did not lead to young people smoking. Christopher Snowdon looked at how critics of smoking bans are labelled as ‘deniers’. He also interviewed David Goerlitz, aka the ‘Winston Man’. Rob Lyons looked at the crazy world of England’s smoking ban and accused UK health campaigners of smoking smokers out of polite society. spiked writers around the world reported on the global crusade against the ‘evil weed’. Mick Hume reflected on what the ban says about today’s society. Dolan Cummings argued that freedom should not be for sale. Or read more at spiked issue Smoking.
(1) New York Eyes ‘No Smoking’ Outdoors, Too, New York Times, 15 September 2009 (2) Mayor Bloomberg vows to snuff out smoking in parks, beaches, New York Daily News, 1 October 2009 (3) For more on the EPA study, see An epidemic of epidemiology, by Rob Lyons (4) See Statistics on smoking, NHS, 29 September 2009 [pdf]
57% of nonsmoking New Yorkers have toxic residue
By Christina Boyle and Kathleen Lucadamo
April 8th, 2009
New Yorkers are getting burned by second-hand smoke, according to a study released Wednesday by the Health Department.
An alarming 57% of nonsmoking New Yorkers – 2.5 million – have toxic residue in their blood because of second-hand smoke, the agency reported in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
“Households with a smoker should set a ‘no smoking’ policy at home to protect the family,” advised Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden.
The high traces of cotinine, a by-product of nicotine, in nonsmokers’ blood puts them at greater risk for cancer and heart disease, he warned.
Cotinine is not harmful itself but it signals exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, officials said.
And in New York, second-hand exposure was far higher than in other, less urban, parts of the country.
Nationally, 45% of nonsmoking adults showed elevated levels of cotinine.
The study found that Asians and low-income New Yorkers were the most likely to have high cotinine levels.
Since the blood survey is the first of its kind, researchers don’t know if cotinine levels increased or decreased among nonsmokers in recent years.
Despite regulations that ban smoking in bars and offices, New Yorkers are unavoidably exposed to tobacco smoke on sidewalks, near buildings and subway entrances, health officials said.
Frieden urged New Yorkers to quit smoking to protect others from smoke damage and has launched graphic TV ads to highlight the impact of the addiction on families.
Response:
This story shows the total failure of smoking bans: The date of the data is 2004, a year AFTER the NY ban, and a year when NY, CA, and DE were the *only* states to ban bar/restaurant smoking. And yet NY’s “exposure level” was 57% – far higher than the national average of 45%.
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”
Response: Michael Siegel, MD, MPH
Study on Cotinine Levels Among NYC Adults Being Used to Implicate Importance of Brief Tobacco Smoke Exposure on Sidewalks and at Building Entrances
NY Times: OK to Defend American Taliban, But Defending Big Tobacco Verboten?
Clay Waters
2009-03-27
It’s enlightening to see what topics New York Times editors find disturbing and newsworthy and which ones they shrug off or ignore.
New York’s new senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, is a Democrat who is nonetheless under strong [1]suspicions [2]at the liberal Times for her support of gun rights and her previous representation of a white conservative district. On Friday’s front page, she came under fire via a stash of old ammo in a story by Raymond Hernandez and David Kocieniewski. “As New Lawyer, Senator [3]Defended Big Tobacco [4].” Gillibrand is in trouble for defending Big Tobacco as a lawyer representing Philip Morris back in 1996.
The Philip Morris Company did not like to talk about what went on inside its lab in Cologne, Germany, where researchers secretly conducted experiments exploring the effects of cigarette smoking.
So when the Justice Department tried to get its hands on that research in 1996 to prove that tobacco industry executives had lied about the dangers of smoking, the company moved to fend off the effort with the help of a highly regarded young lawyer named Kirsten Rutnik.
Ms. Rutnik, who now goes by her married name, Gillibrand, threw herself into the work. She traveled to Germany at least twice, interviewing the lab’s top scientists, whose research showed a connection between smoking and cancer but was kept far from public view.
She helped contend with prosecution demands for evidence and monitored testimony of witnesses before a grand jury, following up with strategy memos to Philip Morris’s general counsel.
The industry beat back the federal perjury investigation, a significant legal victory at the time, but not one that Ms. Gillibrand is eager to discuss.
The Times was looking for remorse:
Asked whether Ms. Gillibrand had any misgivings about representing the tobacco company, [spokesman Matt] Canter responded by e-mail: “Senator Gillibrand worked for the clients that were assigned to her.”
The paper’s balancing section was very brief:
During her most recent congressional race, Ms. Gillibrand, who is a former smoker, accepted $18,200 in campaign donations from tobacco companies and their executives — putting her among the top dozen House Democrats for such contributions. Many Congressional Democrats do not accept tobacco money.
Mr. Canter said the senator should be assessed based on her record in Congress, where she has voted against the industry’s interests on several occasions, including supporting cigarette tax increases to help expand children’s health care.
And Todd Henderson, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, argued that it would be unfair to assess lawyers by whom they represent. “Nobody would want to live in a world in which lawyers are judged by the clients they take,” he said.
The Times would certainly not want anyone to use professor Henderson’s criteria to judge Obama Justice Department appointee Anthony West. Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed [5]West [6]as the President’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
So what’s news? West (hat-tip the inimitable humorist James [7]Lileks [8]) was the defense lawyer for John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban fighter captured in Afghanistan after 9-11 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. A search indicates the Times has not breathed a word about the West nomination either online or in print, much less brought up West’s controversial client on the front page, as it did with Gillibrand’s ties to evil tobacco companies.
The Times evidently has no trouble with an Obama Justice Department appointee having represented a Taliban fighter and enemy of America, but is immensely bothered by Gillibrand having represented American tobacco companies, who were after all selling a legal product that people purchased freely.
It’s been five years since Mayor Bloomberg slapped a cigarette ban on the city’s bars and nightclubs. But at trendy hot spots like Rose Bar and the Beatrice Inn, plenty of fashionable New Yorkers are breaking the law and lighting up.
By Sara Cardace
KING BLOOMBERG
MIKE IS A MAYOR RUN AMOK
By FRED SIEGEL
November 22, 2008
When Mayor Bloomberg deployed his vast personal and political power to overturn the term limits law, he began to demystify the public relations image he had purchased at considerable expense.
It was only then that New Yorkers began to recognize the danger of making Gotham’s wealthiest man its chief executive. That recognition is the reason his approval rating slipped by nine points in the latest Marist poll. The public chose a mayor; they didn’t expect an elected monarch.
POLL: Not As Many Folks Like Mike Now
The latest furor over his unaccountable power is his unlawful refusal to send out property tax rebate checks that have been due since Oct. 1. “We have no money . . . this is not a legal issue, it’s a fiscal issue,” he says, an argument that boils down to “I know better.”
But the cupboards are bare because Bloomberg has emptied them for his own political ambitions. While the stock market was heading south, Bloomberg, one eye on a potential presidential run, raised his approval numbers by expanding the city payroll. Since 2004, he has hired at least 40,000 new city employees, while bringing his own mayoral staff to record levels.
Similarly, to help clear the way for a third term, Bloomberg has been shoveling out considerable money in the form of newly negotiated u nion contracts with the Policeman’s Benevolent Association, DC37 and the Corrections Officers that run above the rate of inflation. If it wasn’t above an elegant gentleman such as the mayor to stoop to such measures, you might call this what Tammany Hall did: vote buying. Bloomberg is only too happy to raise property taxes on the unorganized middle class if that’s what it takes to keep the power of the city’s politically well-organized u nions in his corner or on the sidelines come election time.
People assume that because of his successful career in business, Bloomberg is a manager and not a politician. That gets things exactly backwards.
As mayor, he’s been little interested in management. When the Staten Island Ferry crashed, killing 11 people, the politically well-connected Transportation Commissioner was spared a reprimand, let alone fired. When the mayor was informed that a set of subway switches had burned out and couldn’t be replaced for months or even years, guaranteeing massive delays, Bloomberg nonchalantly said fine, that’s the way it will have to be. He reversed himself only after howls of public protest. When a blackout produced by Con Ed incompetence left more than 100,000 Queens residents without electricity for a week, Manager Mike declined even to visit the affected areas until the press began to hound him. Even then he declared, “I think [Con Ed CEO] Kevin Burke deserves a thank you from this city. He’s worked as hard as he can.” It took 13 construction-related deaths before the mayor was moved to replace the City Building Commissioner.
Bloomberg touts himself as a CEO who can negotiate the best deal for the city. But part of running the city includes bargaining with people he can neither give orders to, nor buy like the City Council. That’s made Bloomberg a singular failure in Albany, where the mayor tried to steamroll his ill-conceived congestion pricing plan through the Assembly. The plan, which seemed designed as much to provide Bloomberg with a green issue for his presidential campaign as to decongest Manhattan, met with a skeptical response. Bloomberg’s reaction was to blame his defeat on “gutless” opponents. While arguing over whether to reauthorize Off Track Betting, the Mayor clashed with the normally mild-mannered Governor Paterson, whose support is essential for the city; Paterson came away describing the mayor to the Post’s Fred Dicker as “a nasty, untrustworthy, tantrum-prone liar who has little use for average New Yorkers.”
While Bloomberg has been little interested in management, he has been superbly self-promoting. Early on he sold credulous journalists on the idea that he was a post-partisan mayor, a man who rose above conventional party politics. This is in a sense true. He has been only too willing to buy support from either of the major parties to achieve his own ends. A self-described “liberal Democrat,” he shipped out with the Republicans under a flag of convenience in order to run for mayor in 2001. He then abandoned the GOP to become an independent, and his staff is now exploring the chances of his running as a Democrat for re-election in 2009.
But talk of party labels misses the point. Bloomberg runs his own personalized political party. He is not so much bi- or non-partisan as his own political pole, one that offers Michael Bloomberg as the sole program.
*
The traditional danger with party candidates is that they can be bought up by special interest groups. Bloomberg reverses the old game; he’s won office by buying up the interest groups.
When in office, Bloomberg – like most mayors – used public funds to keep the organized interests happy while putting the city at fiscal risk. But Bloomberg adds a twist, by dipping into his own vast treasury to buy support through “anonymous” gifts to non-profit institutions.
For years, our so-called “business savvy” mayor has only one strategy: Spend. In 2007, the city took in 41% more in taxes than it did in 2000. And yet that wasn’t enough to cover Bloomberg’s gargantuan vote-buying spree. During Bloomberg’s first six years as mayor, notes The Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, city spending shot up about 50% – from $41 to $62 billion. That meant that even in the midst of an unprecedented boom, Bloomberg’s genius required the city to incur record levels of debt.
One method of buying support has come in the form of lavish subsidies to his wealthy developer friends. Early in his administration, when Bloomberg was still presenting himself as a reformer, he promised to end the practice of “bribing companies” to stay in New York. Yet that is exactly what he did in the case of developer Jerry Speyer, part owner of Yankees, who is building the New Yankee Stadium, and Fred Wilpon, owner of the Mets. Between direct and indirect subsidies the city is committed to spend nearly a billion dollars on the two very profitable teams in what amounts to a transfer of money from working stiffs into the pockets of the wealthiest New Yorkers.
The Industrial Commercial Incentive Program, meanwhile, designed to retain business that might flee the city’s onerous taxes, has doubled under Bloomberg. Today roughly 6,000 business received a half a billion dollars in the kind of rebate relief that the mayor now wants to deny to middle class homeowners.
For those who object to his tax strategy, Bloomberg always has the same response: “we’re just not going to return to the dark old days of the ’70s, when service cuts all but destroyed our quality of life.”
It’s not clear if this argument is willfully ill-informed or merely self-serving evasion. But it was John Lindsay’s tax hikes in the years leading up to the fiscal crisis that sent the city spiraling down into effective bankruptcy. The upshot was that in the 1970s, the city work force faced major layoffs, which only deepened the downturn. We’re again headed down that path. Even as Bloomberg hikes the wages of senior workers who are crucial to the leadership of their respective u nions, and hence Bloomberg’s royal re-election bid, he’s threatening sizeable layoffs for the newest hires.
The city was only rescued from the Lindsay/Beame policies when the stock market revived in the early 1980s. That was the beginning of the long boom built on highly leveraged financial firms that has now come to a definitive end.
Bloomberg is so committed to his ideal of the “luxury city” run by and for the wealthy and organized interest groups that the Wall Street collapse took him completely by surprise. Like Lindsay’s successor, the hapless Abe Beame, Bloomberg seems not to understand what’s happening around him. His budget projections are based on the notion that the future economic path will be shaped like a U, but it’s more likely to look like an L.
New York, which became ever more dependent on Wall Street’s high rollers to create each new job a thousand-dollar meal at a time, is going to have to rethink its economic future. Wall Street as we knew it is never coming back. The high taxes and over-regulation Bloomberg prefers pushes out the small- to medium-size businesses that will have to drive much of our economic growth in the future.
*
We’re likely to look back on the Bloomberg years as a time of lost opportunities to build on the gains of the Giuliani years. Between 2003 and 2007, the vast flow of revenues produced a boom that gave the city a chance to dig out from under its massive debt and restructure its labor contracts. Instead, Bloomberg’s agenda added costs that will plague the city long into the future.
There is no better monument to Bloomberg failures as a CEO – of his arrogant inability to negotiate, of his purchased reputation – than with New York’s education system.
Bloomberg, who has had whole subway cards plastered with ads and full-page spreads in the newspapers touting his educational “achievements,” has done a far better job of promoting himself than improving the schools. He has nearly doubled the education budget. Yet his “reforms” have created considerable chaos in the schools, which have now been re-organized three times to little educational effect. What the changes haven’t produced, Bloomberg’s vast PR operation notwithstanding, is improvement on the national education tests. His education legacy to date: the debts that will have to borne by a work force ill-prepared for the economy to come.
Bloomberg says he’s beyond politics. He’s right. We’re living in his monarchy, subjects to his unwavering faith in himself.
Fred Siegel, senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Civic Innovation, is writing a book on the making of modern liberalism.
Ex-Inmate Loses Lawsuit Over Secondhand Smoke
By JOHN ELIGON
Published: May 14, 2008
A man who was notorious among the city’s law enforcement officials for being a leader in the illegal numbers business has lost a lawsuit against the Department of Correction that blamed the Rikers Island smoking policy for his bladder cancer.
A jury voted 6-0 on Friday to reject the claim of the man, Raymond Marquez, who pleaded guilty to illegal gambling charges in 1996 and had to pay a fine of $1 million. Mr. Marquez was arrested two years later on similar charges and spent 29 months at Rikers waiting for his trial. It was during that time, Mr. Marquez said, that he was exposed to secondhand smoke that led to the cancer diagnosis in 2000. (Mr. Marquez was acquitted of the crime he was charged with in 1998.)
At that time, prisoners could smoke in the inmate living area. In 2003, when the city passed its public-smoking ban, that practice ceased.
Mr. Marquez, 78, filed the $15 million suit despite the fact that he had been a smoker for 30 years. David Marquez, Mr. Marquez’s son and lawyer, said that his client had not inhaled deeply when he smoked, and that by the time he went to Rikers, he had not smoked for 23 years.
“There are medical books, current and past, that say that the risk for bladder cancer in someone who has smoked dissipates over 20 years to the level of a never smoker,” David Marquez said Tuesday afternoon.
The lawyer said he was considering appealing the jury’s verdict. He said his father was not in the dire stages of cancer.
Scot Gleason, the lead lawyer for the city in the case, said he believed he sold the jury on two major points.
“We never violated any laws,” he said.
He said he also persuaded the jury to consider society’s attitudes toward smoking at the time Mr. Marquez was in Rikers, 1998-2001, not what they are now.
“The way we as a society have treated secondhand smoke has evolved over time,” he said, adding that there was a time it was perfectly acceptable to smoke in the workplace or anywhere in a restaurant.
But David Marquez said that the ventilation system at Rikers was untested and inadequate, and that the people running the jail had a responsibility to keep the ventilation up to standard because of the high rate of smoking.
“The landlord had an obligation to maintain the place in an environmentally safe condition,” he said.
Dating to the 1950s, Mr. Marquez, who had the nickname Spanish Raymond, was at the top of the illegal numbers business. He was something of a Harlem celebrity, touting flashy clothes, cars and jewelry.
Nov 18, 2007 By CHINKI SINHA
Utica, N.Y. – The Mohawk Valley’s large numbers of low-income families and refugees are factors contributing to the region’s high smoking rate, experts say.
County official calls Carousel policy ‘the right thing to do’
October 18, 2007
By Rick Moriarty, Staff writer
Smoke ’em if you got ’em, but not at the Carousel Center.
Starting Jan. 1, the mall will ban all smoking on its property, including sidewalks, parking lots and loading docks. Smoking has been banned by state law inside the mall since 2003, but it is allowed in outdoor areas.
The new policy will apply to shoppers and employees alike.
Rob Schoeneck, the mall’s general manger, said the total ban is part of the mall’s efforts to be the premier shopping center in the region and to promote a healthy work and shopping environment. He said health experts have determined that no amount of secondhand smoke is safe, even in outdoor areas.
“The evidence continues to grow regarding the health dangers of secondhand smoke,” he said Wednesday at a news conference announcing the policy.
Dr. Cynthia Morrow, Onondaga County commissioner of health, said she knows of no other shopping center in the Syracuse area with a smoking ban that includes outdoor areas.
“We certainly think it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “We hope others will follow.”
Martha Ryan, senior director of cancer control for the American Cancer Society in the Central New York region, said she could find no other shopping center in the country that bans smoking in outdoor areas.
Ryan said the ban could help smokers by encouraging them to quit and will protect nonsmokers because they no longer will have to breathe in secondhand smoke as they enter the mall. She said 3,000 nonsmokers die each year in the United States from secondhand smoke.
“The idea that smoke outdoors quickly dissipates is false,” she said.
William J. Kemble
RED HOOK – School board members on Thursday voted to ban from school grounds “clothing, bags, lighters and other personal articles” that have tobacco logos or other smoking-related “identifiers.”
August 2007
Who’s Still Smoking?
Cigarette Use Among Adults in New York City
June 19, 2007 NEW YORK – New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday switched his party status from Republican to unaffiliated, a stunning move certain to be seen as a prelude to an independent presidential bid that would upend the 2008 race.
More and more bar and clubs across the five boroughs are reportedly allowing patrons to smoke – violating the city’s four-year-old ban.
By ANGELA MONTEFINISE
