[Mpls] St. Paul considers smoking ban - should Mpls?

[Andy Driscoll]

on 5/5/04 4:12 PM, WizardMarks wrote:

> WM: What about established restaurants whose business, built up over a
> couple of generations from virtually nothing to a restaurant that
> supports a family and provides 50+ jobs to the community. Which set of
> regular customers does he kick out? He follows all the rules, he keeps a
> genuinely nice establishment, etc., etc.

> Either way he goes, he loses half is regular business--every day regular
> business. You screw him with  this solution.
> 
> WizardMarks, Central

Not true at all. The facts are these: the smokers need not smoke and the
nonsmokers are safer. Ninety percent of the retail experience in places
where smoking was banned has been a major increase in revenues and profits,
for even the most reluctant bar and restaurant owners. Ask bar owners in
Manhattan and Boston and California. All their fears of revenue losses and
profit reductions have been blown away by the increase in traffic.

I was part of today's news conference in St. Paul, standing with my former
political adversary, still-smoking Dave Thune, to talk about the death trap
of second-hand smoke - not just for nonsmoking customers, but for workers as
well. Speaking as well were several prominent local restaurant owners whose
success multiplied once they kicked smoking (not smokers) out of their
places - The New Louisiana (same owners as The Uptown Diner and Calhoun
Grill), Café Latté (and Bread & Chocolate), Mai Village Vietnamese
Restaurant and even that haven for recovering alcoholics - the Day by Day
Café. 

Lowell Pickett, owner of the Dakota Bar and Grill is wallowing in
compliments and money for his jazz restaurant since he opened with no
smoking downtown. What a pleasure it was to know I could go listen to Connie
Evenson and her quartet, enjoy a meal sans smoke and taste the food and
drink (coffee) without choking on the atmosphere he had in Bandana Square in
St. Paul.

Smokers may believe they have a right to smoke. Perhaps they do, but, in
public, they are a public health hazard. They can kill themselves, if they
wish, but they cannot be allowed to kill others. Period.

Bars and restaurants open to the public have the law of public accommodation
keeping them open. They do not have the right to impose on any member of the
public an atmosphere of danger by simply walking inside and trying to eat.
And they have no right to put their employees in daily danger maintaining as
they do the poisonous air in their closed-up cafés and restaurants.

As a smoker, I fought my addiction as best I could, but even when I was
among smokers, it could get intolerable. I was gestated, born and reared in
a household of smokers, addicted by the time I entered the world, and worse,
afflicted with asthma that curtailed activity as young boy. I barely coughed
by the time I started smoking for real at age 14, and my oblivious parents
actually gave me a carton of cigarettes when I turned 15 (still illegal an
age to smoke in public). That was 1954. I was already on my way to the
emphysema and asthma that will now shorten my life by, probably, 15 years.

Then, 30+ years later, at a young age 45, I found myself unable to walk up a
hill without collapsing in a breathless heap.

If the same segregation that now occurs because smokers and nonsmokers must,
generally, eat and drink in separate places, was based not on smoking, but
on race or ethnicity or gender, owners and the cities that license them
would be in court over the discrimination. Smoking sections would be like
whites only areas, except worse. Whiteness alone doesn't infest others'
bodies with dangerous poisons constrictors the way smoke does to the
nonsmoking sections.

Someone said it eloquently: having smoking and nonsmoking sections in a
restaurant is like having peeing and non-peeing sections in a swimming pool.

Smokers need not stop smoking to eat out in a smoke-free environment. But
nonsmokers must definitely avoid bars and restaurants where smoking is
allowed. Our access to all bars and restaurants are curtailed in ways that
smoke-free establishments do not impose an impossible environment on
smokers.

You may know this or not, but as of today, announced Mark Mishek, President
of United HealthcareAllina, no smoking, even in designated areas and parking
ramps - the works, the entire campuses of their facilities will be
smoke-free. (I've always been astonished at the number of health care
workers who continue to smoke in the greater wealth of knowledge of their
mortality and morbidity from their addictions.)

Do not misunderstand me about this: this is a terrible drug, nicotine, the
worst, most addictive of all drugs - and it's legal as well as lethal. I've
had to kick a couple of them myself. Alcohol as well as nicotine. The fear
over the loss of those addictions is second only to the denial that we are
actually addicted to anything - powerless over a drug's effects on our
systems and behavior. It ain't easy, but it's absoluetly critical that those
addictions are not passed second-hand to anyone else by the mere presence of
airborne nicotine - especially for the children and for adult nonsmokers.

Recent studies have proven that very short exposures to airborne poisons and
drugs in areas where smoke of any kind is ambient will have the same
deleterious effects on one's health as if they'd spent hours in such a
place.

Not only should every city in the state do this for the health of its
citizens, the state itself should impose this ban on bars and restaurants
everywhere. Talk about boosting tourist traffic and saving billions and
billions in annual health care costs based on this addiction. Smokers should
welcome this with open arms.

Andy Driscoll
Crocus Hill/Ward 2
Saint Paul
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