Published: February 17, 2008 01:55 am      

Stringent non-smoking regulations under review

Including public ban, which has been introduced in Legislature

FAIRMONT — When Catherine Whitworth’s son attends play rehearsal in a Morgantown theater next door to a pool hall that shares an interior corridor, he can smell cigarette smoke emanating from the billiards area.

“I’m concerned about any exposure to tobacco, especially involuntary,” Whitworth said. “Fortunately, my son doesn’t have asthma. Exposure to that can trigger an asthma attack.”

Whitworth chairs a group called Smoke Free Mon County, a coalition that wants the Monongalia County Board of Health (www.monchd.org) to pass a “100-percent protection clean indoor air regulation.”

The proposal, currently in a public comment period, would prohibit smoking in just about all public places in Mon County, including restaurants, which currently operate under an 80 percent/20 percent non-smoking/smoking split.

It also would require employers to provide a smoke-free workplace for all employees, which effectively would eliminate smoking from places not specifically mentioned in the proposal, including bars.

“The reason that we think it is important is that the regulation that is currently in place has many exceptions that are still allowing way too many people to involuntarily be exposed,” Whitworth said. “We would like to get the workers who are not protected protected.”

More stringent non-smoking regulations are under review in several other places, including Marion and Harrison counties. And a bill has been introduced into the West Virginia Senate that would prohibit all public smoking in the state, although currently it is considered educational and not likely to get through this year’s legislative session.

As in Mon County, smokers in Harrison County still can find a place to light up in restaurants, but not in Marion County. Smoking is still allowed in bars in all three counties, although that might change soon.

Seeing someone lighting up in public used to be a common event, but the wave of the future indicates that there will be fewer and fewer public refuges for smokers, both in the state and in the country.

For anti-smoking advocates like Bruce Adkins, that’s a good thing. In addition to eliminating the threat of secondhand smoke, which has been shown to cause lung cancer and heart disease in non-smokers, Adkins sees other benefits, too.

“There is no question that smoking bans do a couple of different things,” said Adkins, director of the state Division of Tobacco Prevention (www.wvdtp.org). “It is proven that they improve the health of the general public.

“No. 2, we know that these smoking bans are a good deterrent to help kids from ever starting to use tobacco if they don’t see it in public and they are not around it in public. And third, it absolutely helps people quit. It’s not as easy to smoke in your workplace if you have to go outside to smoke.”

How this will be accomplished remains to be seen. Neither Adkins nor Christina Mickey, project coordinator for the Smoke-Free Initiative of West Virginia, based in Morgantown, can give an opinion one way or another on the bill introduced last month by Sen. Dan Foster, D-Kanawha and a retired surgeon, that would ban smoking in public throughout the state.

And while it sounds like something that a non-smoking advocate would approve, there could be loopholes.

“My No. 1 thought is that if the bill would stay implicitly and exactly as it is proposed, it would be a good bill for the state of West Virginia,” Adkins said. “But I’m always worried about pre-emptions and exemptions.”

In other words, if the bill ended up not allowing allow counties to keep existing regulations that might be tougher than the legislation — as it does now — some counties’ regulations actually could be weakened.

That would not be the case right now in Harrison and Mon counties, according to Mickey.

“Harrison and Mon counties are only two of eight counties in the state that still allow smoking in restaurants,” Mickey said. “That is a little bit surprising.”

Both counties currently have ventilation provisions for the designated smoking areas, but “ventilation experts across the country as well as the surgeon general have said that type of separation and relying on ventilation extraction systems are very ineffective in removing the cancer-causing agent,” Mickey said. “It’s led to some compliance issues and to grass-roots groups wanting those venues smoke free.”

However, some bar and restaurant owners worry about the effects of tougher regulations. Jerry Lorenze, owner of Suburban Lanes bowling center and Kegler’s sports bar, both in Morgantown, has opposed stricter regulations.

“I am against the government’s interference in a private business,” he said. “I do agree that there are places that smoking shouldn’t be.”

To that end, he has opened Kegler’s II in the basement of Kegler’s as a non-smoking version of the bar, and he said that some Kegler’s employees who have been given the opportunity to work at Kegler’s II have declined.

Lorenze, however, would support a statewide bill that would ban all public smoking because he believes that would offer a level playing field for all business owners. He worries that if Mon County bars have to ban smoking, some patrons will go to another county and might not come back.

“We have a bowling center in the Columbus area, and three years ago, the county we were in — Licking County — had smoking banned. We saw 40 percent of our business go to different counties.

“Now Ohio is a total non-smoking state, and we didn’t get the business back.”

Mickey, Adkins and Whitworth disagree with Lorenze’s assessment. Adkins provided statistics from the West Virginia Bureau for Public Health stating that eliminating smoking from businesses can save money through lower insurance premiums, lower maintenance and cleaning costs, and reduced absenteeism.

“The science is clear now,” Mickey said. “We know these policies don’t produce negatives in the community. They are cost-effective, and we will continue to see counties and states responding until we get virtually everyone protected. That is the goal.”

Whitworth does not understand why bar owners would prefer to cater to smokers when more people do not smoke and many of them might bypass a bowling alley where children would be exposed to smoke.

“It is sad that there are people turning away half of their business to cater to the 22 percent who smokes,” she said. “I don’t understand that as a business decision.”

West Virginia actually has the second-highest overall smoking rate in the country, at 25.7 percent, behind Kentucky’s 28.6 percent, both above the national median of 20.2 percent. The Mon County smoking rate, Whitworth noted, is lower than the state average.

Currently, 48 of West Virginia’s 55 counties already have some type of smoking ban, with 17 of those counties not allowing smoking in any public venue, Adkins said. Those counties include Ohio, Pleasants, Wood, Ritchie, Tucker, Wirt, Jackson, Calhoun, Upshur, Randolph, Roane, Braxton, Pocahontas, Kanawha, Lincoln, Wyoming and Summers.

“The more populous, progressive counties can pass these things, and West Virginia has done wonderfully well with high-tobacco use counties as well,” Adkins said. “That’s why passing regulations at the local level and educating are a very good way to pass these regulations. It makes it easier to enforce the ban. They understand why the ban has been passed.”

E-mail Mary Wade Burnside at mwburnside@timeswv.com.