Smoking Banned Around Hospitals in New York

The New York City Council unanimously approved a bill on Wednesday to prohibit smoking within 15 feet of the entrance or exit to any hospital. Lawmakers said the measure was a logical and necessary extension of an existing ban on smoking in hospitals, in place since 1988, and the ban on workplace smoking, one of the Bloomberg administration’s key initiatives, which took effect in 2003.

Smoking Banned Around Hospitals in New York

“When visiting a hospital, the last thing patients should have to worry about avoiding second hand smoke,” the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said before the vote. “Patients should not have to walk through plumes of smoke on their way to seeing their doctor.”

The legislation, introduced by Councilwoman Inez E. Dickens, a Manhattan Democrat, applies to general hospitals, diagnostic and treatment centers and residential health care facilities. The measure not only bans smoking within 15 feet of hospital entrances or exits, but also smoking within 15 feet of the entrance to or exit from a hospital’s outdoor grounds.

A coalition of antitobacco groups — including the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids — supported the legislation.

The city’s 1988 Smoke-Free Air Act already bans smoking in hospitals, clinics, psychiatric facilities, residential health care facilities, physical therapy facilities, convalescent homes and homes for the aged.

In a Monday hearing on the measure, staff members for the City Council reported that several states — Arkansas, Colorado and Hawaii — and municipalities — Buffalo; Duluth, Minn.; and Sioux City, Iowa — had passed similar measures restricting smoking around hospital entrances.

Pentagon Considering Smoking Ban for Military

The U.S. military’s long, storied love affair with tobacco may be doomed.

The Pentagon, which actively promoted smoking during the two world wars and still subsidizes tobacco at PXs and commissaries, is considering a ban.

Pentagon Considering Smoking Ban for Military

That’s one recommendation from a panel led by a former dean of the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill that was asked by the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs how to reduce tobacco use in the military.

If Secretary of Defense Robert Gates accepts the group’s suggestions, it would be a historic about-face for the likes of Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, where tens of thousands of young men and women learned to smoke amid a culture that regarded cigarettes as much a part of being a soldier or Marine as carrying a rifle.

“It’s all I see on the bases,” said Staff Sgt. Maritza Hunt, a squad leader at Fort Bragg.

Hunt, although not a smoker, was skeptical of how successful efforts to curb tobacco use would be.

“You have colonels and generals and all kinds of people who smoke,” she said.

The military could end tobacco use within 20 years by gradually refusing entry to users, said Stuart Bondurant, dean emeritus of the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“If the services take the full 20 years, practically everyone now in the military would be retired,” he said.

The panel that Bondurant led issued a report in June that found that 22 percent of VA patients and 33 percent of active-duty troops use tobacco, compared with 20 percent of the U.S. population. Use is even higher among deployed troops.

Racetrack asks health board for smoking ban exemption

Dan Adkins asks Health Board For Racetrack Smoking Ban

Representatives from the Tri-State Racetrack and Gaming Center asked the Kanawha-Charleston Board of Health to reconsider the county’s smoking ban at the racetrack, but health officials weren’t sympathetic.

Dan Adkins, the racetrack’s vice president, asked the health board to allow a partial exemption for the “one-of-a-kind” establishment that would designate smoking and nonsmoking areas within the casino and gaming area.

“We can handle smokers and nonsmokers. We have had total separation in the past and are asking for consideration again since we are a unique destination within the state,” Adkins said.

He said the racetrack has lost $15 million in revenue in the past year, more than half of which officials blame on the smoking ban.

“Nine million of that can be attributed to nonsmoking,” he said. “Yes, we’ve had an economic downturn but that can’t account for a full 24 percent drop in revenue.”

Members of the health board weren’t inclined to reconsider the ban.

“It’s hard in one year to make any determination on if the smoking ban has affected losses, especially because of the economic downturn,” said Brenda Isaac, the board’s president. “It will be discussed, but I would not be inclined to make an exception.”

Other board members felt the same, saying the racetrack was welcome to ask to be reconsidered, but the board shouldn’t go back on what it passed.

“It’s first and foremost a health issue. We are doing this because of the evidence against [smoking],” said board member Dr. Shannon Snodgrass.

The smoking ban has caused tourism revenue in the county and state to shrink, Adkins said.

“We track our players like any other casino and we know that our dollars are going out of state where people can smoke,” he said.

According to Adkins, Tri-State is the only one of the state’s three racetracks with table games to have a smoking ban, which he said makes the restriction to his business unfair.

“As long as the ban is fair and equal, we’ll cooperate,” he said. “We aren’t being treated fairly. We’re asking for a level playing field.”

Learn how to Quit Smoking

“I constantly struggle with it [smoking]. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes.”

– President Obama, June 23, 2009

Learn How To Quit Smoking

I started smoking when I was 16, pilfering cigarettes from my mother’s purse or swiping unfiltered Pall Malls whenever my dad left his opened pack untended. Then I got a job that summer and began buying my own — Newports with menthol and filters, a brand preferred by all the young tobacco initiates I had begun to share my habit with.

The rituals of smoking were many, and we adopted them all, along with the identity they gave us, the new sense of ourselves as grown-ups, even if we were faking it, aping our elders as a means of proclaiming our difference from them — a neat trick.

We’d all strike poses learned from the movies, or practice smooth moves in the art of lighting up. We studied how to flip away a cigarette butt in a gesture of defiant insouciance, or how to cup a cigarette against the wind. We learned how to light one cigarette from another, or to light one from a gas stove without singeing our hair. We taught ourselves how to blow smoke rings.

Some of us made a fashion statement by enfolding a cigarette pack in the sleeve of a T-shirt, and others thought it a mark of adolescent elegance to cock a cigarette behind one’s ear.

We also picked up courting practices that included the touch of a hand as we lighted cigarettes for our girlfriends. We attempted to look sensitive in the way we pulled smoke into our lungs ever so contemplatively, then exhaling slowly, desperately trying to impress.

Those first cigarettes I smoked would lead to a couple hundred thousand more, consumed over more than 30 years, long after any of it seemed cool, and much past the time when smoking was a choice. What began as a desire for acceptance and admission to adulthood became the mark of a pariah, bearing the stamp of loserdom, as smokers huddled near the entrances to our workplaces. We’d take quick drags on our illicit smokes while colleagues exited and entered the buildings with looks of disdain or beleaguered tolerance for our pathetic need.

The arc of American tobacco addiction began during World War I, when doughboys fresh off the farms were given tobacco and rolling papers as part of their ration kits, an explicit government endorsement of a practice that I’m sure killed more of those young soldiers than enemy bullets ever would. My grandfather picked up the habit in uniform and passed it down to me — as did guys such as Humphrey Bogart and a legion of other actors and writers of my granddad’s generation who enshrined the practice as the hallmark of toughness or sophistication.

Women were taught to smoke largely as a means of weight control (perhaps that benefit is why our president is so elegantly slim). Thousands of ads from the 1920s through the ’50s promised glamour and trim silhouettes to our grandmothers and mothers. Those ads helped persuade my mom to start smoking before she conceived me when she was 16, by which time she was already a nicotine addict. Even doctors joined in the campaign to get women to smoke, endorsing some brands over others and promising menstrual mood control and suppression of “nerves.”

The social pressure to start smoking is less today than it was in Mom’s day — or mine — but, every day, 3,500 Americans under 18 try their first cigarette, and 1,100 make it a habit, according to the American Cancer Society. Some are enticed by flavorings designed to attract the young. The tobacco bill passed last month bans most flavorings, though a political compromise exempted the one — menthol — that helped hook me. But overall, giving the federal government new powers to regulate tobacco is a good thing, likely to save lives.

Mark Twain famously said that quitting smoking was easy, that he’d “done it hundreds of times.” I found it equally “easy,” swearing off cancer sticks on an almost daily basis until I finally managed to smoke my last cigarette 15 years ago.

My mother quit a few months ago. It was “easy” for her too. She has lung cancer.