THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610180008
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 53 lines
Norfolk City Hall discourages smoking and other tobacco use by municipal employees. That's in keeping with a nationwide trend. Private enterprises and governments banish smoke from the workplace and encourage healthy living by employees.
The military is in step with the trend. It banned smoking in enclosed spaces several years ago.
But a Norfolk policy prohibiting all smoking in all settings by public-safety employees - firefighters, paramedics and police officers - strikes us as unnecessary.
Yes, Virginia Beach prohibits off-duty smoking by police and firefighters, and it is not the only municipal government that does. But anti-smoking sentiment has advanced so far so fast that there is a smoother way to address the challenge of curtailing smoking by public-safety workers.
Enforcing a no-smoking-off-duty policy
could transform some city officials into offensive busybodies. Mayor Paul D. Fraim and councilmembers Herbert M. Collins, Daun S. Hester and W. Randy Wright understandably expressed reservations about the no-smoking-on-or-off-duty provision contained in a package of proposed physical-fitness policies applicable to public-safety personnel.
Physical-fitness standards, yes. Preferential hiring of nonsmokers as well as nonabusers of alcohol and other drugs, yes. Prohibiting smoking on the job, yes. But forbidding smoking by employees wherever they might be? That strikes us as distasteful and potentially destructive overreaching.
Public-safety personnel should be fit; they engage in physically (as well as mentally and emotionally) stressful occupations. And cities have every right to attach conditions to the employment of - especially, but not solely - police, firefighters and paramedics who are to varying degree never quite off duty.
But charging smokers high health-insurance premiums, as Norfolk does, and ending workplace smoking have already done much to reduce tobacco use by U.S. adults in and out of uniform.
Continuing reductions in smoking are virtually assured. The thickening web of restrictions reinforces popular hostility to smoking. Statistics and countless studies confirm beyond doubt that smoking is debilitating to everyone, and especially to firefighters.
But favoring nonsmokers in hiring is the surest way, at least over time, to shrink the percentage of smokers in public-safety ranks. For studies also show that anyone who reaches age 21 without lighting up is far less likely to smoke in his/her mature years than one who starts smoking in the teen and preteen years.
Whatever the dimensions of the smoking problem among public-safety personnel, Norfolk ought to be able to deal with it most effectively by letting it be known that job-seeking smokers should seek employment elsewhere. by CNB