Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 13, 1993 TAG: 9301130004
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
RIGHT TO LIGHT BEFORE FLIGHT FACES FIGHT
Change comes slowly to Virginia, particularly where there's money riding on the status quo, so tobacco is not as widely reviled here as it is elsewhere.A crop about as inviting as a pick-your-own razor-blade bramble, tobacco in Virginia still generated $197 million in sales in 1991 - five times the dollar amount of tomatoes, a much less diabolical harvest.
Meanwhile, that tobacco can kill you has become a given. Now, the mere smoke from a smoldering cigarette is being fingered, too, as a killer.
Legislators plod along, whining about diminishing tax money to squander, but refusing to tamper meaningfully with the 3-cent-per-pack tax on cigarettes - a hilariously low rate that is but a fraction of what some other states collect.
It's a triumph of tradition over wisdom, a common approach to government in Virginia.
It sounds hopeless, but it is not. There still are about 6 million people in Virginia who aren't on the dole from tobacco lobbyists, and some of them are still thinking clearly.
Cigarette smokers are being directed to fire up outdoors rather than inside businesses and public buildings.
The Roanoke Regional Airport could be next.
The airport's new terminal opened 3 1/2 years ago, a great, big, airy place where smokers were ceded a vast chunk of indoor air. Smoking was permitted everywhere, unless otherwise noted. Such a hodgepodge of territories is an enforcer's nightmare, so the rules were largely up to offended parties to police. It was like inviting rival clansmen to share a couch.
Smoking is a way for the nicotine-addicted to calm the jitters, and a lot of people get jittery when they trust their lives to a wedge of aluminum propped up by a couple of wings with exposed rivets. So they light up, at no small inconvenience to themselves and others.
Smoking USAir passengers have to sit at Gate 3, regardless of which gate their flight leaves from. Dropped cigarettes have burned holes in the airport's carpeting. And airport customers have complained about smoke.
None of this has gone unnoticed.
Jacqueline Shuck, the airport's director, is drawing up a no-smoking policy that would ban smoking from all public areas of the terminal building. She says that the airlines serving Roanoke seem to have no objection.
All airlines have banned smoking from all domestic flights. Dulles and National airports, which serve Washington, D.C., have banned smoking, as have other large airports.
If you can't smoke at your destination, and you can't smoke in-flight, why should you be able to smoke as you depart?
Shuck hopes to present a no-smoking policy for airport commission approval by March.
The commission could exile cigarette smokers outdoors to puff off their preflight or post-flight jitters on the open-air front patio. There stands a modernistic sculpture that looks - now that you mention it - like a few upright cigarette butts, their flaming tips reaching triumphantly skyward.
It could once have been considered the quintessential Virginia sculpture - symbolizing the triumph of tobacco over mere mortals. Now it'll just be a place for smokers to lean.