This is a trees versus the forest issue. It is difficult to appreciate the damange smoking has done to our society, though we've enjoyed it for years. Slowly removing it from our mainstream lifestyle helps people stop smoking altogether which is good for everyone. Enforcement on the beach is easier than littering cuz people smoke 'em for 3-5 mintues. Smoke wafts, my brother.

Martin my friend, good to hear from you again. Hope all is well on Staten Island. I have to disagree with you here, even tho I'm a non-smoker. I believe people should make the choice to stop smoking based on their own thought process, not a stream of incremental government disincentives. The societal benefits of regulating diet are undeniable as well, from a public health and costs standpoint.

But government here suggests, coerces and informs, rather than engaging in heavy-handed regulation of people's personal choices, flawed as they may be.

Additionally, where DO you draw the line, once you start on various types of outdoor smoking bans?

Ah, it's so good to hear a neo-con position, esp. over here in the knee-jerk capital of the world. Food is not the same as smokes, at least not anymore. At one point, smoking was a growth industry in the US. No longer. You know that. The profits come from overseas, so curtailing it here has been going on for years, starting first with cancer scares, then under the Clintonista regime avec a former NYS Department of Health Commissioner who became US Secretary of HHS. As to food, the market and people work together to make progress, too. First it was all of the heart attacks and strokes from obesity, then the diet revolution took over. Even McDonald's has a leaner menu than years ago due to the demands from an aging population that wants salads. Government demands labels on everything for content and calories. It's an incremental way to control and hopefully help our lives. If you can imagine this, the Mayor of NYC, has outlawed smoking in all establishments of a certain size, even bars! I find that a stretch, business complains, but the official view is that intense 2nd hand smoke is an infringement on personal rights. Smoke 'em if you got 'em- outside. Sheesh.

Matt,
Your arugment against banning smoking outdoors equallly applies to banning it indoors. Instead, just require each business to post whether it allows smoking or is smoke-free. Then I can choose for myself. Less than two weeks ago at the Richmond, VA airport I (never smoked) sat in the smoking section. I knew it was the smoking section and I would have had no complaint at all if someone blew smoke in my face.

When the law reaches inside businesses to control behavior without complaint, the chain of events leads to banning smoking on the beach, then in homes. While continuing subsidies to tobacco farmers. A "pefectly predictable surprise."

June 29, 2004

No Smoking at the Beach?
by Robert A. Levy

Robert A. Levy is senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.

Here we go again. First it was the health police in Santa Monica, Los Angeles and Malibu. Then the butt-heads in Los Angeles County. Now it's the legislature, about to consider a bill to shield every sun worshipper statewide from the tribulations of beach smoking, and defend every grain of sand along the 1,100-mile coastline against cigarette litter.

One argument for the beach ban goes like this: Cigarette butts are a major source of litter. On cleanup days, volunteers say they pick up an average of more than 300,000 butts along the beach. If so, that's a powerful argument—but against littering, not against smoking. A ban on smoking is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. It's over-inclusive because responsible smokers who properly discard their cigarette butts do not contribute to litter. It's under-inclusive because irresponsible non-smokers who improperly discard food wrappers and soda cans are major contributors to litter. By all means, let's keep the beaches clean. Anyone who flips a cigarette butt onto the sand may deserve to be fined. But let's reserve our ire, and our legal remedies, for those who actually do something wrong.

The second argument against beach smoking is that secondhand smoke, even a wisp on breezy days, is a health hazard. The short answer is that no evidence exists to support that bald assertion. Indeed, a substantial body of evidence cuts the other way. In 1996, the American Heart Association journal, Circulation, reported no increase in coronary heart disease associated with secondhand smoke "at work or in other settings." Two years later, the World Health Organization reported "no association between childhood exposure to environmental tobacco smoke [ETS] and lung cancer." A 1999 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded, "We still do not know, with accuracy, how much or even whether [ETS] increases the risk of coronary heart disease."

Then there's the granddaddy of all secondhand smoke studies: the landmark 1993 report by the Environmental Protection Agency declaring that ETS is a dangerous carcinogen that causes 3,000 deaths annually. Five years later, a federal judge lambasted EPA for "cherry picking" the data, excluding studies that "demonstrated no association between ETS and cancer," and withholding "significant portions of its findings and reasoning in striving to confirm its a priori hypothesis."

More recently, in the May 2003 British Medical Journal, researchers found that passive smoke had no significant connection with heart disease or lung cancer death at any level of exposure at any time. Those results, stated the American Council on Science and Health, are "consistent" with studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So what, you might argue. Maybe secondhand smoke doesn't kill people, but how about the harm to people with pre-existing asthma, respiratory infections, or eye allergies? After all, public beaches belong collectively to the citizens of a community. Why shouldn't those citizens decide, through their elected representatives, what conduct is permissible and what is not? Why should a minority of smokers be able to dictate public policy to a majority of non-smokers?

Ordinarily, in a democracy, we let the political process set restrictions on the use of public property. But there are limits on the exercise of political power. Under our constitutional system, a nonsmoking majority cannot arbitrarily stamp out the rights of a smoking minority. For a regulation to be legitimate, there must be a good fit between the regulation and the goal it seeks to accomplish.

That means smoking should not be banned—even on public property—without showing, first, that the ban will be effective and, second, that it will not proscribe more activities than necessary to reach its objective. Those two showings have not been made. The scientific link between secondhand smoke and various diseases is far from proven—especially on beaches. And regulations often prohibit smoking in locations that are not particularly confining, where patrons can easily avoid harm by taking a step or two away. If the scientific evidence were more compelling and the ban were limited to, say, reading rooms in public libraries, elevators in government office buildings, and restrooms at a state university, then a ban might be warranted. Not otherwise.

Government, not secondhand smoke, is polluting the beaches. Surely we can protect the legitimate rights of non-smokers without prohibiting smokers from relishing an occasional cigarette by the sea.