Smoking In Cars: CT Smoking In Cars

They’re All Bad for You, but Should They Be Illegal?

April 1, 2007
By Fran Silverman

IS it the government’s job to prevent people from engaging in unhealthy behavior? Or is it to give them the best available information so they can decide for themselves what to do? A flurry of bills aimed at banning a range of habits — from smoking in cars with young children to serving partially hydrogenated foods in restaurants — have state lawmakers weighing privacy issues against public health concerns.

If passed, bills introduced recently in the state legislature would ban restaurants from serving food that contains trans fats and require calorie and nutrition information on menus; bar adults from smoking in cars in which young children are passengers; and require insurers to offer discounts to policyholders who lose weight.

State Senator Mary Ann Handley, co-chairwoman of the General Assembly’s health committee, said there was no dispute that trans fats, secondhand smoke and obesity are harmful. The question is what approach is most effective in changing behavior.

“When do you act on public good and when do you become the nanny?” said Ms. Handley, a Democrat from Manchester who introduced the menu-labeling bill. “That is a line that is not easy to draw. I’m generally in favor of letting people get the information they need and letting them make the decision.”

State Representative Henry Genga, a Democrat from East Hartford, said the cigarette-ban bill he introduced was intended to protect children from illnesses like asthma related to secondhand smoke. Adults repeatedly found smoking with young children in the car could be charged with a misdemeanor. Opponents of the bill argue that it violates a person’s right to privacy.

“Let’s not give government the key to our door so they can come into our homes to fine us and punish us,” said Gary Nolan, a spokesman for the Smoker’s Club, a smokers’ rights group. “This is a free country, and you have the right to be wrong.”

State Senator John McKinney, a Republican from Fairfield who co-introduced the trans-fat bill, said it was modeled after New York City’s ban, passed in December, the first of its kind in the nation. Mr. McKinney said many of the bills were aimed at preventing future health problems.

“All these bills should be taken in the context that we as a state and 49 other states are struggling with what to do with skyrocketing health care costs,” Mr. McKinney said. “What people instinctively know and what doctors will tell you is prevention is the key to so much.”

Opponents of the restaurant bills say forcing a switch to cooking oils may be a financial burden, as would mandating that restaurants provide nutritional information for all menu items.

Simon A. Flynn, chief executive of the Connecticut Restaurant Association, said that while many restaurants were already moving to eliminate trans fats, a deadline would drive up the cost of alternative oils and foods. He said it would cost a restaurant more than $600 to have just one item analyzed and print its nutritional information on menus.

The Super Duper Weenie in Fairfield, where Mr. McKinney lives, has already eliminated foods with trans fats, but the owners say they fear the cost of alternative oils will increase. On a recent busy weekday, with lunch-time lines edging out the door, John Pellegrino, a co-owner, was whipping juicy hot dogs off the grill while chatting with customers. He said labeling his menu items, which include “the Californian” — a hot dog piled high with meat chili and cheese — would be a problem, and he might have to pass the higher costs on to customers. And most people, he said, already know which foods they shouldn’t eat.

The other co-owner, Gary Zemola, said, “If you are looking to count calories, what are you doing here?”

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LETTER: Smokers’ ‘fix’ helps driving safety
By: Michael A. Padlipsky, Los Angeles
02/17/2007
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To the Editor: It all started with a “sound bite” on Headline News. A then-9 year old Connecticut boy named Justin Kvadas was asking, “If you can’t talk on a cell phone or eat while driving a vehicle, how come you can still smoke?”

The story went on to say that his State Representative had decided that was such a good question he was proposing legislation to ban smoking in cars with children in them.

Now, it happened I already knew the answer to young Justin’s question because a California legislator had made a similar proposal a couple of years ago, without even having a 9-year old to blame it on, and I reluctantly reside in California and am, shudder, a smoker.

(And no, I have nothing to do with the tobacco industry other than as a consumer, no matter what you might think; feel free to “Google” Padlipsky, which should make it clear that I’m actually one of the Old Network Boys of the Internet.)

So even though I don’t have children to worry about driving around, I’d already thought the issue through and found the hidden kicker. The problem was that now that “everybody knows” smoking is evil, I couldn’t get any of the newspapers out here, much less my own State Assemblyman, to pay any attention to the analysis.

Fortunately, after an exchange of some netmail, as we called it when we were inventing it, the Editor of Justin’s hometown newspaper is willing to let me answer the question on his pages. Here’s hoping the Nico-Nazis don’t get him.
The answer is based on a particular fact that “nobody knows” about what “everybody knows” about smoking. It goes like this:

The reason why it doesn’t make sense to ban smoking by drivers is exactly the same as the reason why it does make sense to ban cell phone use and eating – the safety of all concerned, which would be jeopardized by the drivers’ being distracted.

Huh? Well, yeah. Here’s the point: “everybody knows” smokers are addicts. (I could argue against that, but won’t, here.) But “nobody knows” what their withdrawal symptoms are. However, if you look them up (the Physician’s Desk Reference is an easy place to do so; just notice what symptoms “nicotine gum” and “the patch” are supposed to relieve), you’ll see that the main ones are difficulty concentrating and increased irritability.

Hmmmm. If a smoker can’t smoke – equals is denied his or her “fix” – when driving, those really aren’t the sort of things one would like to see her or him suffering from, are they? Difficulty concentrating. Increased irritability. Sure sounds like it’s got to promote accidents, crashes, and/or “road rage”, and a lot of those incidents will lead to fatalities.

But what if we say that smokers aren’t really addicts, even if everybody knows they are. After all, I myself say that I’m nicotine-dependent, but I’m not an addict based on the definition of addiction that was in use for around 60 years before it was subtly changed at some point in the 1990’s so that the negative connotations of “addict” could be applied to smokers. Sorry, won’t help. Addict or dependent, believe me, you do get irritable (in my case, very irritable) and have trouble concentrating when you’re denied what I call the medication of choice for my condition.

OK, but what about the dangers of “secondhand smoke”? So we kill some kids now in the crashes the impaired drivers get into, but aren’t we saving more kids in the long run?
Probably not. For a couple of reasons:

In the first place, even if we could come up with “the numbers” and did know how many deaths impaired drivers would cause and how many deaths secondhand smoke would cause, we can’t overlook the fact that the ones from crashes are “now” and the ones from smoke are years and years from now. Not that we can come up with such numbers of course, but it seems pretty clear to me that if I were 9 I’d rather not be denied 60 or 70 years of life just because everybody knows secondhand smoke’s bad.

In the second place (no surprise, I hope), it turns out there’s a “nobody knows” about secondhand smoke that really ought to make the first place uninteresting. Let’s approach it this way: if secondhand smoke were as dangerous as we’re told, how can it be that Japan and France, two countries famous for high levels of smoking, come in first and third in the World Health Organization’s Average Life Expectancy rankings? “Smoking – including ‘passive smoking’ – kills” but people live longer on average in places where there’s more smoking? Something’s fishy, and it’s not just the diets.

That might seem too facile, though. Before we conclude that “nobody knows” second-hand smoke is nowhere near as dangerous as “everybody knows” it is, let’s consider a couple of other things almost nobody knows:
The famous EPA report that was the basis for the “bum rapping” of “Environmental Tobacco Smoke” might well have meant well, but it wasn’t done well. It seems (based primarily on a column by Robert Scheer in 1994, but confirmable elsewhere) that they started out with 30 previous studies on “ETS”, threw out 19 of them (which hadn’t reached the conclusion they were looking for), and then lumped the rest together in a statistically inappropriate fashion to come up with a claim that secondhand smoke was responsible for 3,000 deaths a year, nationally. About the same as from bicycle accidents.

As honest statisticians know, it’s actually quite hard not to lie with statistics inadvertently; but it’s awfully easy to do so on purpose, and that’s what they did when they didn’t use all of the previous studies … to say nothing of when they lowered the customary statistical “confidence” number even to get to 3,000. (The climate of the time was already so antismoking; of course, that it wasn’t long before the California Department of Health Services was running commercials claiming 53,000 deaths per year and making it sound as if that were for California alone.)

But, you might argue, that was a long time ago and there’s been a lot more research since. Indeed. My favorite is the one where the World Heath Organization commissioned a major study to prove once and for all that secondhand smoke is dangerous and when it didn’t reach the conclusion they expected they suppressed its publication (based on an article in the London Daily Telegraph, which got no more play over here than the Average Life Expectancy surprise did).

Note very carefully that I’m not saying secondhand smoke is harmless, I’m just saying that its “risks” are being exaggerated (in fairness, probably by people who genuinely believe that smoking in general is bad, on balance) … and the public tends to go along because by now they’ve lost the desensitization to ambient smoke they used to have when “everybody” smoked and now find the smell objectionable. But that’s aesthetics, not science.

Banning smoking drivers, then, is trading conjectural long-term health consequences off against logically certain near-term deaths (and dismemberments, physical and psychic traumas, etc.). A classic, and tragic, “unintended consequence”.

OK, OK, much as I’d like to cross more I’s and dot more T’s, as it were, this has already gone on long enough that I’m not at all sure the kindly Editor will make space for it … and I’m realistic enough to know that most readers won’t have read it all anyway. So I’ll conclude where I began: The answer to Justin’s question is that banning smoking by drivers would do more far harm than allowing cell phoning and eating, if only what nobody knows about what everybody knows were known.

Michael A. Padlipsky
Los Angeles

Mr. Padlipsky is the author of The Elements of Networking Style and Other Essays and Animadversions on the Art of Intercomputer Networking , “the world’s only known Constructively Snotty computer science book” (?1985, reprinted ?2000)

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A Tobacco Issue Ignites Debate

February 9 2007
By LORETTA WALDMAN, Courant Staff Writer

“The exploitation of children is the latest tactic in the efforts of anti-tobacco extremists. In this case, well-meaning legislators are being seduced into passing laws that serve only to line the pockets of major pharmaceutical companies who make alternate nicotine delivery systems. You see, they are the ones bankrolling the promotion of the misconception that second-hand smoke is a deadly carcinogen.

Extremist will argue that the debate is over. It’s not. Want proof? Anti-Tobacco Federal Court Judge Osteen vacated the EPA’s report on secondhand smoke (the same report the Surgeon General relied upon) asserting that the agency had “cherry-picked” its data and “adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the agency’s public conclusion.” More proof? Compare OSHA’s Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs) to the chemicals in secondhand smoke. Littlewood and Fennell, an independent public and health policy research firm with no ties to either side, looked at the data. They found that in an unventilated, 20-square-foot room with a 9-foot ceiling, you would need to squeeze 300 smokers, smoking at a rate of 62 packs an hour, to reach the ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] threshold limit for the chemical hydroquinone, and far more smokers that that for every other chemical on the EPA’s list.

That children should be protected is unarguable; however, legislators should follow the money behind this junk science before they write laws that infringe on parental rights, waste law enforcement resources, and open the door for further removal of personal freedoms.”

– Gary Nolan of Ohio, spokesman for the Smokers Club, an international smokers’ rights group.

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Op-Ed Contributor
Smoke and Rearview Mirrors

February 4, 2007
By GARY NOLAN
Cleveland

ARE we making bad law based on faulty conventional wisdom? It’s happened before and it may happen again.

Connecticut legislators have introduced a bill that would ban smoking in cars when a minor is present. This legislation, the brainchild of 9-year-old Justin Kvadas from East Hartford, is ostensibly being written to protect young children from exposure to the alleged dangers of secondhand smoke.

Don’t get me wrong: I can certainly understand why Justin might feel strongly about the issue — young people have passions. As a child who had allergies, I was offended by people who wore heavy perfume, which set off allergy attacks that made it hard for me to breathe. I commend him and his mother, who helped him in this crusade, for trying to make a difference, especially for infants who have smaller lung capacity and children who suffer from asthma.

But unfortunately laws like these are based on unreliable research. Moreover, this increasing tendency of government to legislate the way we choose to live our lives and raise our children has got to stop. If we’re not careful, children like Justin may eventually be banned from the ice cream parlor or a burger joint because of government concerns over the fat content in food.

Many published reports on secondhand smoke, or what is often called environmental tobacco smoke or passive smoke — including the most recent report from the surgeon general — rely on a study by the United States Environmental Protection Agency that was done in the early 1990s. This study says that secondhand smoke is responsible for as many as 3,000 deaths a year.

But this figure was released before the study was completed and received a great deal of public attention. When the research was concluded, the number of deaths from secondhand smoke could not be determined because a relationship could not be established. Perhaps fearful of appearing to backtrack, the agency adjusted its data, reduced the accepted benchmark for cause and effect and eliminated some studies, before officially releasing the report.

In fact, William Osteen, a federal district court judge in Greensboro, N.C., who has ruled both in favor and against the tobacco industry, vacated this study’s findings, recognizing that it was junk science. He asserted that the agency had “cherry-picked” its data and “adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the agency’s public conclusion.” Although this ruling was overturned on a jurisdictional technicality, the judge’s assessment of the agency’s conduct was never legally challenged.

To be sure, there are other studies supporting the dangers of secondhand smoke, but almost all of them were underwritten by pharmaceutical companies that produce alternative nicotine delivery systems like nicotine patches, gums, inhalers and lozenges. Their conclusions, therefore, have to be regarded with suspicion.

Because of these studies, lawmakers in Connecticut are now debating whether to require police officers to stop adults smoking in their cars if anyone in the vehicle is suspected to be under the age of 18.

But studies aside, spending money to enforce such a law seems absurd when there are rapists, child molesters and murderers out there.

Every day, we become more and more of a nanny nation, telling parents how they should feed and care for their children. This latest legislation, which is also being considered in California and Maine (similar bans were recently enacted in Arkansas, Louisiana and Puerto Rico), is another example of government dictating our personal choices. Legislators are telling us how to live, not just on public property but in private places like restaurants, bars and even our homes.

In some states, custody in divorces is being awarded on the basis of whether or not one of the parents smoke. At least seven states prohibit or restrict smoking around foster children. That means foster children can be removed from otherwise loving families simply because a foster parent smokes.

The reality is that just as a prudent parent would not feed a child allergic to peanuts a peanut butter sandwich, a smoking parent would not smoke around an asthmatic child. Proponents of anti-smoking laws argue that we are obligated to protect asthmatic children from parents who lack the common sense not to smoke around them.

But is the appropriate response to issue a ticket to every smoking driver who appears to have a minor child in his or her car? After all, police officers aren’t stationed at grocery stores citing parents for buying peanut butter if they have a minor with them, on the chance that the child might be allergic to peanuts. Nor are parents stopped from entering a candy store because they might have a diabetic child.

At some point, this all has to stop.

Let us not usurp the rights of parents, abuse private property rights, waste valuable law enforcement resources or hand over our liberty to the state on the basis of faulty conventional wisdom. In the meantime, Connecticut, all eyes are on you.

Gary Nolan, a former nationally syndicated talk-show host, is a spokesman for the Smoker’s Club, a pro-smoking group.
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Lawmaker proposes smoking ban for cars transporting children

January 5, 2007
Susan Haigh

HARTFORD, Conn. –Nearly four years after state lawmakers voted to ban smoking in Connecticut bars and restaurants, an East Hartford legislator wants to stop people from lighting up in their cars.

State Rep. Henry Genga, D-East Hartford, has submitted a bill that would prohibit people from smoking in cars when children are inside. Genga said he got the idea from a 9-year-old constituent who e-mailed him last year.

“It’s coming from the young people and you’ve got to listen to the public,” he said. “And this is coming from the public.”

Motor vehicle smoking bans took effect in Arkansas and Louisiana over the summer.

According to Connecticut’s Office of Legislative Research, the Arkansas law applies to drivers riding with children who are required to use child restraint systems because they are under 6 years old or weigh less than 60 pounds. Violators are subject to $25 fines.

The Louisiana law applies to children under 13 and imposes a fine up to $150 or 24 hours of community service for a first offense.

Genga said he wants Connecticut’s law to mirror Louisiana’s. Under his proposal, a police officer would be able to stop a vehicle if he or she sees someone smoking with a youngster inside.

David Sutton, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA, the nation’s largest cigarette maker, said the company discourages adults from smoking around young people but believes the owner of a private residence or car should determine whether smoking is allowed inside.

Gary Nolan, spokesman for The Smoker’s Club Inc., a national pro-smoking group, said fears about secondhand smoke are based on what he called “junk science” and children are already exposed to many of the chemicals in cigarettes.

Nolan, a smoker, said he wishes everyone would quit but thinks bills such as Genga’s infringe on smokers’ constitutional rights.

“I think smoking in front of your children is a very bad influence,” he said. “I would suggest that you not do it. But I would never suggest writing a law.”

Genga’s bill was filed Friday and awaits action by the legislature’s Select Committee on Children, as well as other committees.

In 2003, the Connecticut legislature banned smoking in bars and restaurants, but not in private clubs or the state’s two tribal casinos.

The move prompted outrage from smokers and bar owners, who complained that the ban infringed on their rights and hurt their businesses. But efforts to repeal or revamp the law have fizzled.

January 5, 2007

HARTFORD, Conn. — Smoking is already banned in Connecticut bars and restaurants.

Now, a bill on the table at the Capitol would allow police to pull you over if an officer saw you smoking with children in your car.

“I think it’s smart because kids who have asthma, they could get really sick from that,” said Kayla Gonzalez of West Hartford.

It was an e-mail from a 9-year-old like Kayla that prompted state Rep. Henry Genga of East Hartford to propose the bill.

“People have started talking about it. I’m talking to them, and they’re saying, ‘Geez, you know, it makes a lot of sense,'” Genga said. “We’re talking about young children, and who do they have to speak for them?”

Genga said the proposal follows Connecticut’s child safety seat guidelines. It would be illegal to light up with children in a car who are under the age of 7 or under 60 pounds.

“I think it’s great,” said Robin Sleath of Manchester. “I don’t think people should be smoking in cars. It can start accidents because people aren’t paying attention to their driving.”

“Secondhand smoke is really bad and, having two asthmatic kids, I think it’s really great not to smoke in a car,” said Joanne Gonzalez of West Hartford.

But others said the ban would burn up freedom of choice.

“I don’t smoke with my niece and nephew in the car, but I think it’s someone’s choice. I think you should let it be someone’s choice,” said Jerry Formarelli of Hartford.

“It’s common sense. There’s enough education material out there, I feel, for smokers to realize that it can be harmful to someone who is developing and growing, such as children,” said Sean Jarvis of Manchester. “But it still should be a conscious choice of the parent or of the guardian.”

Genga said the boy who gave him the idea circulated a petition and got 200 signatures, including the mayor of East Hartford.

Similar laws do exist in Louisiana and Arkansas.

Connecticut legislators will get to air their thoughts as the bill proceeds through the legislative process, including discussion before the committee on children, NBC 30’s Lauren Petty reported.
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