Smoking In Cars: AR Kids in cars ban?

By Jonathan On Jul 5, 2017

AR kids in cars ban update

Smoking ban drifts too far

12/3/2006

Twenty years ago, mounting evidence that secondhand smoke posed a threat to non-smokers prompted the National Academy of Sciences to call for a smoking ban on all domestic airline flights. The reasoning was pretty simple: The enclosed space and recycled air of an airplane cabin pose a particular danger. Nevertheless, the federal government’s answer was an emphatic “No.”

How remarkably times have changed.

Airliners are smoke-free, and a sea change in public attitudes about smoking is prompting restrictions of all sorts. Today, 18 states ban smoking in most workplaces. Ohio and Nevada join the list this week; two more states join next year. Bans on smoking in restaurants and other public spaces are proliferating. Further, smoking is in decline, from 26.5% of U.S. adults in 1986 to less than 21% last year. Smokers clearly are losing political clout. This is a remarkable success story, but some people seem intent on proving that there can be too much of a good thing.

The first signs of trouble were bans on smoking in places where secondhand smoke poses no threat to health. Last year, for instance, San Francisco banned smoking in public parks.

Now the battleground is the family car.

Earlier this year, Arkansas and Louisiana banned smoking in cars carrying young children. Similar proposals have been introduced in seven other states.

The benefits are dubious.

While children of smokers indisputably are the primary victims of secondhand smoke, cars aren’t the biggest problem. Children are exposed to far more smoke at home. But with the home beyond the reach of regulation, anti-smoking advocates have struggled to find a way to protect them.

A public education campaign to persuade parents not to harm their kids might have helped, but instead, states used billions won in the late 1990s by suing the tobacco industry for unrelated spending. Most states, Arkansas and Louisiana included, spend less than the minimum recommended by the federal government on anti-smoking programs.

So their new laws, illogically, now burden police. With nearly 1,200 children younger than 10 killed in traffic accidents and 130,000 injured across the nation last year, shouldn’t police focus on such violations as drunken driving, speeding or failing to buckle a child into a car seat or seatbelt?

Rep. Bob Mathis, the author of the Arkansas bill, doesn’t even expect the law to function as written. He set the fine at $25, which can be suspended if a driver attends a smoking-cessation program. He says he doesn’t want the law to “be punitive”; he wants to educate parents. If Mathis wants to educate, he should have sought state funds for a public advertising campaign.

When children are endangered, there certainly is reason for public attention and for government action. But not without limits and not for show.

If smokers are to be stopped from letting their habit jeopardize their children’s health, then it will have to done not by fiat, but by persuasion.

That’s not as easy as banning smoking on airplanes. But until the nation decides that parents no longer get to decide what’s best for their kids, it’s the only option that can work.

Protect our children

12/3/2006
By Bob Mathis

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that secondhand smoke is bad for your health. Anyone who has shared an office with a smoker or waited tables in a smoke-filled restaurant knows this. The Surgeon General’s report on “The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke” has documented the overwhelming evidence that secondhand smoke causes premature death and disease in children and in adults who do not smoke.

Legislation in many states has focused on protecting workers from secondhand smoke. Much of the debate has centered around who has the right to control the airspace: smokers who wish to smoke anywhere they please or non-smokers who believe they have the right to breathe clean air. The voices not heard in this debate, however, are those of children, who can’t speak for themselves.

So, as member of the Arkansas House, I am speaking up for them. Do adults have the right to expose children to secondhand smoke? My answer is “No!” Tobacco smoke contains many poisons, including arsenic, benzene, cadmium and carbon monoxide. We know that children exposed to secondhand smoke are more likely to die from sudden infant death syndrome and develop pneumonia or ear infections. Secondhand smoke also causes severe asthma and retards lung development. Making children breathe tobacco smoke is a form of child abuse.

We need to get our priorities straight and do everything we can to make sure our children grow up in safe and healthy environments. That includes protecting them from secondhand smoke.

The law I sponsored in Arkansas prohibits smoking in cars where young children are passengers. Obviously, cars are not the only place where children are exposed to tobacco smoke. For that reason, we must go further and encourage all parents of young children to stop smoking. As the surgeon general reports, there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke. As a former smoker, I know it’s possible to quit. There are many programs that offer help. But until you quit, please, smoke outside!

Bob Mathis is a Democratic representative in the Arkansas House.

Lighting up with young kids in vehicle banned under bill

April 29, 2006
JAKE BLEED AND MICHAEL R. WICKLINE

House Bill 1046 started out as a joke to just about everyone but Bob Mathis. And now it’s his turn to laugh.

The Hot Springs Democrat and reformed smoker spent much of this week in strong opposition to a bill to ban smoking in most workplaces.

It was a Mathis amendment that came close to killing that bill, says Gov. Mike Huckabee, the primary supporter of the measure.

So when Mathis filed a bill Wednesday evening to ban smoking in cars carrying young children who are restrained in car seats, a lot of people laughed. They didn’t take him or his bill very seriously, Mathis says.

But he showed up Thursday morning ready to fight. He got his bill through the House Rules Committee at noon, then through the full House just before 5 p. m., representatives approving it 58-13, with 29 House members not voting.

The bill went to the Senate on Thursday night, shot through the Senate Committee on Public Health, Welfare and Labor around lunchtime Friday, and wound up on the Senate floor just before 2 p. m.

Sen. Terry Smith, D-Hot Springs, the Senate sponsor of the bill, said the measure means adults would be barred from smoking in vehicles with children in child safety seats.

“Let’s do something for kids,” Smith said in a brief introduction of the bill.

Senators passed it 33-1, sending it to the governor.

Huckabee at one point Friday told Senate President Pro Tempore Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, that Mathis “was basically doing the bill as a joke and the darn thing passed both ways.”

Huckabee said Friday afternoon that the bill sounded like a great idea.

“It’s obviously protecting the child against secondhand smoke,” the governor said at a news conference Friday. “I think it’s a great bill. I’m glad that’s cleared both houses. Delighted.”

HB 1046 went from laughable to laudable in under two days.

Mathis says the bill fit snugly into the already hard lobbying being done in support of the ban on smoking in the workplace. That bill, Senate Bill 19 by Sen. Tracy Steele, D-North Little Rock, drew the lobbying power of the governor, the state’s chief health officer, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the Arkansas Medical Society and others.

“There was so much emphasis on the anti-smoking things, it seems like it just fit right in with everything else,” Mathis said.

Rep. Will Bond, D-Jacksonville, didn’t vote on the bill when it came up in the House on Thursday.

“What happened to that bill, by the way ?” he asked Friday evening.

Bond said he didn’t vote because he was too busy worrying about legislation meant to satisfy the state Supreme Court, bills that were the original reason for having the session in the first place.

“We were trying our very best to complete our work on the mandate for Lake View. To do it in a week, to show the public that we’re working our hardest,” Bond said. “Things get moving rather quickly.”

Mathis’ bill amends a section of existing law that requires children who are under the age of 6 and weigh less than 60 pounds to ride in a “safety seat properly secured to the vehicle,” according to Arkansas Code Annotated 27-34-104. Breaking that law can mean a fine of between $ 25 and $ 100.

Mathis’ bill simply bans smoking in all motor vehicles carrying children who are restrained in those seats. The bill carries a $ 25 fine, which can be waived if drivers prove they have entered a smoking cessation program.

Violating the bill would be a “primary offense,” Mathis said, meaning police could use violations of the bill to justify pulling someone over.

“And I’m tickled to death about it,” Mathis said.

He said he wasn’t particularly sure how police would determine the age or weight of children while trying to enforce the law. He said his bill was meant to be enforced in the same way as A. C. A. 27-34-104.

“I don’t know that the police are going to be out there with a scale weighing anybody,” Mathis said.

A spokesman for the Little Rock Police Department said he wasn’t too sure on how the law would be enforced in the field, either.

“That’s a good question,” said Little Rock Police Sgt. Terry Hastings.

“The law enforcement of it is something that would have to be worked out. If a parents says, ‘No, they’re 7,’ that could be a problem.”

Mathis, who is term limited, says the bill would become part of his legacy as a lawmaker. He said he regularly hassles other drivers when he sees them smoking in a car with children. Sometimes they give him dirty looks, Mathis said. Sometimes they give him “the obscene gesture.”

Huckabee declined to say Friday whether he would veto any of the bills passed in this special session. Information for this article was contributed by C. S. Murphy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Arkansas Bans Smoking in Cars with Young Children; Other States to Follow?

April 26, 2006
By Michael Siegel
The Arkansas legislature has enacted legislation that prohibits smoking in a car with a child who is required to be restrained in a safety seat (any child who is less than 7 years old or weighs less than 60 pounds). The law calls for primary enforcement (which means that a police officer can pull a car over for this violation alone) and is punishable by a fine of $25, which is waived if the smoker enters a smoking cessation program.

The bill, sponsored by Representative Bob Mathis, sailed through the legislature in two days with overwhelming legislative support and little discussion, at the same time as a bill to ban smoking in restaurants (but not bars) was hotly debated, but eventually enacted.

Similar legislation is apparently being considered in Utah, as well as in New South Wales.

The Rest of the Story

The first part of the rest of the story is that Representative Mathis, who championed the smoking ban in cars, was actually opposed to the smoking ban in restaurants. He is apparently so concerned about health that he wants to intrude into the privacy of one’s behavior in one’s own car to tell people what they can and cannot do, but he isn’t so concerned about health that he wants to regulate smoking in people’s workplaces. He is apparently so protective of individual rights that he defends a business’ right to make its own decisions about allowing smoking, but not the right of an individual to make their own decision about smoking in their own car.

The second part of the rest of the story is that the Arkansas legislature seems quite hypocritical for banning smoking in cars, but allowing smoking in bars. If it’s not a health hazard in bars, then it’s not a health hazard in cars, and if anything, the degree of government intrusion inherent in regulating smoking in cars is greater than that inherent in regulating smoking in bars.

In other words, this is public health hypocrisy near its worst. I would argue that banning smoking in cars puts Arkansas into the category of being rabidly anti-smoking. It has become the first and only state to intrude into privacy rights in a person’s own car to regulate smoking. Yet the state is so weak on the issue that it isn’t willing to touch bars. This makes no sense to me, other than to suggest that the Arkansas legislature has no moral backbone or principles. I think the state legislators, especially Representative Mathis, needs a quick intravenous infusion of chondroitin sulfate.

But the worst part of the story is the law itself and what it reveals about the apparent motivations of the Arkansas legislature and the groups which supported this bill.

Importantly, it’s acceptable to do damage to your children’s health as long as you enroll in a smoking cessation program. Doing so waives the fine.

If it were really the health damage to the kids that was at issue here, then it shouldn’t matter whether the violator enters a smoking cessation program, which has a dismal success rate in terms of actual cessation. The punishment is designed for the crime. And here the crime doesn’t seem to be exposing children to secondhand smoke, it seems to be not wanting to quit smoking.

According to this law, as long as you desire to quit smoking and are willing to enter a smoking cessation program to demonstrate that, you are off the hook. You can smoke in your car as much as your heart desires. You’re pretty much off scot free, even for multiple violations, as long as you can prove that you’re attending a smoking cessation program. But if you don’t want to quit smoking or even if you do but you don’t feel that a smoking cessation program would be the best way to do so (and it isn’t for most people), one offense and you’re fined.

It certainly looks to me like what Arkansas is doing is turning the police into lifestyle police. And I mean that quite literally. The police in Arkansas are now being told to turn their attention to the effort to ensure that smokers with young children want to quit smoking. The violation, the police are instructed, is not smoking in a car with kids, but failing to want to quit.

In other words, this bill is really more about trying to alter lifestyle than it is about actually protecting the public’s health.

Now I’ll spend the rest of this post commenting on the policy itself – is banning smoking in cars justified as a public health policy?

I have to admit that this is a very difficult issue for me, because children are truly captive in their parents’ cars, and the acute effects of secondhand smoke can be substantial for young children, especially infants.

Ultimately, however, I do not support legislation that bans smoking in one’s own car. And here’s the reason:

I do not see any real difference between one’s own car and one’s own home when it comes to regulating smoking to protect the health of children. If anything, I would argue that the threat to children from smoking in the home far outweighs the threat from smoking in cars, because although the concentration of secondhand smoke in cars is likely to be higher, the length of exposure in homes is likely to be substantially higher. Moreover, both the overall prevalence and overall time of exposure for children is almost certainly higher in the home than in cars. Many families do not even own a car, but nearly every family lives in some sort of home.

In other words, secondhand smoke exposure in the home is almost certainly a greater public health hazard for young children than secondhand smoke exposure in cars.

So if one is going to support legislation to ban smoking in cars with children, I simply do not see how one cannot also support legislation to ban smoking in homes with children. There is no qualitative difference that I can see between the two, and the quantitative difference would argue for a greater priority on the problem of exposure to secondhand smoke in the home.

Both are examples of the government intervening to protect children from risk of illness or disease due to lawful behaviors of their parents in the privacy of property that they personally own and are not used for business or commercial or any public purposes.

Both involve infringing upon parents’ authority to make their own decisions about behaviors that potentially affect the health of their children.

As much as I hate to see children exposed to secondhand smoke in the home because of the potential health hazards, I simply believe that the privacy rights in the home outweigh the government’s interest in regulating a lawful behavior that is merely a potential threat

Regulating smoking in the home would open the door to a wide range of intrusions into personal privacy that people would, I think, find highly objectionable. I don’t think we want to see regulations that require what parents must or must not feed their kids, how much physical activity their children must have, what their kids can or cannot watch on television, what movies children can watch, or whether or not parents are required to put sunscreen on their children when they go outside to play for an hour.

I therefore view regulation of smoking in cars similarly. I think the intrusion into individual privacy of behavior on their own property outweighs the government’s interest in protecting the health of children from this potential health hazard.