The smoking gun - passive smoke hazards - includes related articles on cigarette advertising, on exporting cigarettes, and on environmental tobacco smoke - Cover Story

E: The Environmental Magazine, Oct, 1994 by Alice Horrigan

The city of Los Angeles passed an ordinance last year banning all smoking in restaurants, and Juan Corona, manager of a McDonald's there, is happy about it. "The no-smoking policy has not reduced business; on the contrary, it has increased it," he said. At a Dallas Wendy's with both smoking and no-smoking sections, manager Kimberly Polk isn't worried about going totally smoke-free. "I think people are becoming accustomed to not smoking in public," she said.

The Smoke-Free Environment Act, sponsored by Rep. Waxman, proposes to either ban smoking completely or restrict it to separate, ventilated rooms everywhere except residential buildings.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), meanwhile, has been concentrating on ETS in the workplace. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich announced in March that, in writing rules for the Indoor Air Act of 1993, it wants to stub out all cigarettes in both private- and public-sector workplaces. Also in March, the Defense Department declared all its workplaces smokeless zones, affecting 3.6 million civilian and military employees. Many federal agencies, including the U.S. Postal Service, have extended the no-smoking rule to their entire grounds,

Dozens of municipalities and states have taken their own initiatives. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have laws regulating smoking in public places, and many of them restrict smoking in private workplaces. According to Action on Smoking and Health, 85 percent of companies now have restrictions in their buildings and one third completely prohibit smoking.

Smokers now huddle at the entrances of their office buildings as non-smokers protest having to pass through a cloud of smoke to get inside. A new product for the outsiders--the enclosed "smoking shelter"--is on the market.

Concerned about the effects of non-smoking ordinances and smoking's bad image on cigarette sales, the tobacco industry is fighting back--sometimes with covert tactics.

Philip Morris, for instance, is one backer of an initiative recently launched for California's November ballot. The initiative calls for a "single, tough, uniform statewide law" to regulate smoking in public areas and workplaces. But critics say it's an underhanded attempt to replace the approximately 270 existing local ordinances in California with a weaker state law. Many people have signed petitions withoutreading the fine print and recognizing the tobacco-industry sponsorship.

ALA alleges that the Tobacco Institute-the public relations and lobbying arm of the tobacco industry, formed in 1958--is using state chambers of commerce to distribute several versions of a booklet called "Workplace Smoking: A Guide for Employers," without disclosing that the publication was financed by the tobacco industry. The Institute is also wooing labor unions with an information kit titled "Workplace Smoking Issues." Philip Morris has also joined five other organizations, including R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, to challenge the EPA's classification of ETS as a Group A carcinogen.