THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503170013
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
Public-smoking restrictions proliferate, with the result that more and more Americans work, travel, study, recuperate, dine and play in smoke-free settings. The clean-air movement continues to overwhelm tobacco-industry opposition on many fronts.
Three decades ago, smoking was still fashionable and non-smokers' unhappiness with smoke dismissed as eccentric. No longer. A third of U.S. companies have banished tobacco smoke from the workplace. More than a hundred U.S. cities prohibit smoking in enclosed public spaces. Governmental offices are largely smoke-free. Smoking is forbidden on U.S. domestic passenger flights and a growing number of international flights. Smoke-free supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, hospitals, airline terminals and schools and colleges are common. The U.S. military sharply restricts indoor smoking and discourages smoking generally; for decades, it promoted the habit.
The nonsmoking majority welcomes the trend, which the tobacco industry fights because it damages cigarette sales. Not fatally, however. The American cigarette market has stabilized, at least for the moment, thanks to cuts in premium-cigarette prices. The tobacco industry has limited the damage to profits by cutting manufacturing and other costs.
Meanwhile, global demand for cigarettes is brisk. American companies, with Washington's assistance, are adding customers overseas despite efforts by the World Health Organization and many governments to curb smoking because of the harm it does to smokers and nonsmokers and the heavy financial and other burdens it imposes upon medical systems.
The conflict between pro-tobacco and anti-tobacco forces looks to be a war without end. Tobacco addicts as quickly and as tenaciously as cocaine. The pleasure it gives assures that countless smokers who recognize smoking's dangers fail again and again to break their dependence upon cigarettes.
Some smokers - or their surviving family members - seek compensation in court for illnesses that they blame on the use of cigarettes. The industry has yet to lose a lawsuit to such plaintiffs.
That may still be true a decade from now even though (1) Florida is suing the industry for $1.4 billion to defray a portion of the state's Medicaid bill attributable to smoking, (2) 50 law firms have joined for the purpose of filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of American smokers generally and (3) the Legal Aid Board for England and Wales has blessed government funding of lawsuits against cigarette makers by 200 people with lung cancer and other smoking-linked illnesses.
But the shift in popular American attitudes toward tobacco and the curbs on public smoking have the look of permanent change, like the disappearance of spittoons in hotel lobbies, restaurants, barbershops and other gathering places. The tobacco companies still whistle to the bank, but nonsmokers are less afflicted by smoke. It's not the smoke-free world that many might want, but it's healthy progress. That's cause for quiet celebration. by CNB