Vivian Davis Figures has been a wonderful advocate for a statewide smoke-free policy. She has sponsored bills in more than a dozen sessions of the Legislature to ban smoking in most public places.
Each year, her bill fails. Figures has tried several strategies to get a smoke-free bill passed. One year, the bill would have banned smoking in restaurants, but not bars. She has introduced the bill early in the session and late. Now, Figures said she’ll push a really tough smoke-free law — but she’ll do it as a constitutional amendment.

Right idea, but wrong strategy.
We admire Figures’ persistence. But aside from the fact that we don’t need one more amendment to our already bloated, archaic state constitution, this isn’t an issue voters should decide.
The point of a smoke-free law isn’t to prohibit people from smoking; that’s a legal, if deadly, habit.
The point is to prevent people who aren’t smokers from having to be exposed to somebody else’s poisonous exhales.
Many workers have no choice but to endure in a smoky atmosphere. Maybe they work in a restaurant or a bar that allows smoking. Or the company they work for doesn’t prohibit smoking. Or the smoking areas are in a place, even outside, where nonsmokers must cross.
Secondhand smoke has long been identified as a killer of nonsmokers. There are about 7,400 smoking-attributed deaths in Alabama each year, with more than 800 of them from diseases caused by secondhand smoke. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a report published last year said exposure to secondhand smoke “causes lung cancer and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in nonsmoking adults and children, resulting in an estimated 46,000 heart disease deaths and 3,400 lung cancer deaths among U.S. nonsmoking adults each year.”
The 2006 surgeon general’s report on smoking noted that “secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance, but a serious health hazard that causes premature death and disease in children and nonsmoking adults.”
That 2006 report pointed out that secondhand smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals, including at least 69 cancer-causing ones.
Regulating a danger such as that caused by secondhand smoke isn’t something you put up to a public vote. Alabama people might very well support a constitutional amendment; barely more than 22 percent of Alabama adults smoke.
Still, any campaign can become emotional. A smoke-free law should be approved by the Legislature — it is supposed to represent the people, after all — through an unemotional process that considers science, medicine and facts.
If people voted against smoking restrictions, that wouldn’t make them right. They aren’t. Smoking kills, and so does secondhand smoke. If somebody wants to harm his own health by smoking, that’s his decision. He doesn’t have the right to harm somebody else’s health, though.

Get ready for a barrage of ads that will come at you with a singularly mind-blowing message: Smoking is bad for you. Not just bad for you. Really bad for you. It’s a fact that should be obvious to any sentient being, yet within the next year or so, not one but two federal agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, will be newly pounding the nation’s airwaves with anti-smoking ads — as if it were a sure thing that you needed them.

To be a smoker in 2012 is not only to ignore the biological reality that the habit will knock years off your life but also shrug off the cultural stigmas — the dwindling number of smoke-friendly public places, the dirty looks — and the fact that heavily-taxed smokes are priced at a point only a one-percenter could easily afford.
If we’ve seen a “denormalization of smoking,” as the CDC describes it, do we need to drop hundreds of millions of dollars on a familiar message during cash-strapped times? If all those appeals to the brain, wallet and pride don’t work, how will a bunch of ads?

As it turns out, anti-smoking ads actually do work. There’s plenty of academic research proving it. And there’s circumstantial, but no less compelling, evidence that in the absence of advertisements, smoking rates don’t go down as quickly as they would without the nagging. And that entails its own costs.

Smoking’s steady decline, which began in the 1960s after the Surgeon General’s initial warning, has leveled off in recent years. Between 1998 and 2005, the adult smoking rate dropped 13%, but since 2005, any changes have been minimal. For the better part of six years, it has been at the 20% mark or just below. All-important youth-smoking rates declined 40% between 1997 and 2003, but between 2003 and 2009, that decline slowed to 21%.

Meanwhile, during those years funding decreased dramatically for the main national anti-tobacco advertising player, Legacy, the foundation funded by the 1998 settlement between tobacco companies and the attorneys general of 46 states. According to Kantar, Legacy’s media budget between 2007 and 2010 totaled about $100 million. That’s the amount Legacy would spend in a single year in its early days. And, at the state level, average household exposure to anti-smoking ads peaked in 2006 and 2007 and has been coming down since, according to a study of Nielsen data by the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“There’s no consistency at the state level,” said Eric Asche, chief marketing officer at Legacy. “And the general trend has been to spend less, not more.”

Connecting the slowing decline in smoking with the steeper drop in anti-tobacco ad spending is to draw a broad correlation. It’s a mug’s game to chart smoking-rate changes directly to the rise and fall of advertising budgets. Media spending is not the only factor in smoking prevention, and probably not even the most important. That distinction goes to taxes. There are other factors, especially smoke-free-air laws that effect bans in workplaces and other public places. With all the activity, it’s difficult to isolate the effects of advertising.

But there’s no doubt that the leveling off of the smoking rate has occurred at a time when many states, amid deep cuts to tobacco-prevention budgets, are spending next to nothing on ads and have been getting little air cover from the national level. This is bad news when you consider how effective those ads have been.

Research scientists have been studying the impact of anti-smoking ad campaigns for decades, even before the “Truth” campaign launched in 2000, when the job was mainly the province of individual states.

Many have found what Sherry Emery, a health economist who has studied the impact of media campaigns at the state level, has. Ms. Emery said that analyses of youth and adult reaction “showed that higher levels of exposure to the state media campaigns were associated with less smoking and more anti-smoking attitudes and beliefs.”

City-County Council President Ryan Vaughn introduced a new citywide smoking ban Monday, but it is unclear whether his tenuously crafted compromise with Democrats will hold together. Democrats made it clear through months of election-year campaigning that they want a stricter smoking ban when they take control of the council next month. They are upset at provisions of Vaughn’s last-minute and, in their eyes, watered-down proposal.

Minority Leader Joanne Sanders said Monday that Democrats haven’t taken roll, but she thinks most are against it.

Vaughn said he hopes he can get six to eight Republicans to back his proposal but admits it could be significantly fewer.

In order for this version to be passed, the measure, which would be stronger than the 2005 ordinance, would have to be voted on at the council’s last meeting of the year later this month. But with a majority of 15 votes on the 29-member council needed to pass the measure, its fate is up to the Democrats.

Many of them are clearly upset with the way this went down. But are they ultimately just blowing smoke?

“To come up with this at the eleventh hour is bogus,” Sanders said. “It’s likely a number of Democrats will want to wait until next year.”

Democrat Angela Mansfield and Republican Ben Hunter — in a nod toward bipartisanship — had been busy last month drafting a strict smoking ban that exempted only tobacco shops.

But Vaughn beat them to the punch, drafting an ordinance of his own that would exempt existing cigar and hookah bars while preventing new ones from allowing smoking. His ordinance also would presume existing social clubs and fraternal organizations to be nonsmoking, unless a majority of members vote by July 1 to retain smoking.

Monday, Vaughn sent his ordinance — along with a controversial redistricting plan — to the Rules and Public Policy Committee. If the committee signs off Dec. 13, Vaughn hopes to vote on both proposals at the council’s Dec. 19 meeting. The smoking ban, if passed, would take effect two weeks before the Feb. 5 Super Bowl — and clean-air advocates see that as a chance to highlight Indianapolis’ progressiveness.

It may not be so simple, though. A group called Save Indianapolis Bars plans to lobby council members to minimize exemptions, so no competitors gain an advantage. While they’re worried about profit, others see it as a public health issue.

“This is unfair to a group of workers who will not be protected,” Sanders said. “And anyone who says people choose where they work in this economy, I think they are in denial.”

Vaughn said he tweaked his original proposal last week after hearing suggestions from anti-smoking advocates to tighten the scope of his exemptions. However, Mansfield and other Democrats say they never saw Vaughn’s original proposal, so it’s difficult to know what was changed.

In an admission of the political reality of the situation, Mansfield said she will vote in favor of Vaughn’s plan. However, that comes with a caveat: She is upset by the way in which Vaughn and Republican Mayor Greg Ballard handled this, so she won’t lobby for her fellow Democrats’ support.

Mansfield met with the mayor and Vaughn about his proposal Wednesday, but she walked away feeling that there was no room for discussion on the ordinance. She had been willing to concede on social clubs — which include veterans halls — if the ban would include cigar and hookah bars.

But Mansfield said she thought their attitude was unyielding: “It was my way or the highway.

“To me, a compromise is if you both start in different directions and end up somewhere in the middle. This was not even an open discussion,” she said Monday.

Vaughn, though, sees it as a clear compromise. The number of workplaces that allow smoking in Indianapolis, he points out, would drop from an estimated 370 to about 60 or fewer.

“I really think this represents our only chance at a compromise,” he said. “The mayor felt pretty strongly he wasn’t going to support anything more strict.”

That may be so, but Democrats are clearly steamed about the whole process. The smoking ban, Mansfield said, should be a council issue.

“I tried to explain that to the mayor,” she said. “I don’t think he understands this three branches of government thing.”

Still, for all of the debate in Indianapolis, others see the potential smoking ban as clear progress.

Lindsay Grace of the anti-smoking advocacy group Smoke Free Indy said — even with the exemptions — that this is still a good ordinance.

The group will lobby the Indiana General Assembly next year for a statewide ban. And, if the local ordinance passes, Grace said she hopes the state follows the lead of its capital.

Elsewhere in the country, she said, states have followed the lead of influential cities. For instance, she said, New York and Boston both helped pave the road for statewide bans.

“If we can show the General Assembly that Indianapolis can do it in a bipartisan fashion with support from the public health community, we think that will go a long way in the Statehouse,” Grace said.

State Reps. Charlie Brown, D-Gary, and Eric Turner, R-Cicero, will be watching Indianapolis’ move. They’re likely to sponsor the state legislation.

“It would be a big benefit if the largest city in the state takes that quantum leap and goes smoke-free,” Brown said.

The campaign aims to raise awareness of the harmful effects of both active and passive smoking. The campaign will encourage and motivate people not to smoke in public places in order to reduce the damaging effects of passive smoking. The campaign had been organized in Hanoi on November 1 by the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to the Ministry of Health, the country spent up to VND2,304 billion (US$ 109 million) on treating lung cancer, coronary artery disease and obstructive pulmonary disease besides 25 other tobacco-related diseases in people, in 2010 alone.

According to a World Health Organization representative, last year Vietnamese people spent around US$1 billion on buying cigarettes.

The campaign will run from November 1 to December 1. The media is fully supporting the campaign and providing free multimedia promotional material to be shown on TV, pasted on buildings, bus stations, supermarkets and public places.

The campaign also hopes to garner the support of communes and policy-makers in the country.

At the launch ceremony, Dr. Luong Ngoc Khue, head of the Health Examination and Treatment Department under MOH, said Vietnam is among 15 countries in the world which has the highest number of smokers.

According to a survey conducted by MOH and WHO in 2010, the percentage of Vietnamese male adults who smoke is 47 percent (or 15.3 million of the total population) with 33 million being passive smokers at home and 5 million being passive smokers at their workplace.

40,000 people die of smoking every year, three times more than the number of people dying from road accidents.

Cigarettes are expensive in New Jersey. Our state has the sixth-highest cigarette tax in the nation at $2.70 per pack. Given that there are more than 1 million people lighting up in New Jersey that makes for a pretty powerful revenue stream. But of all that money, a rather measly portion is going to smoking prevention programs.

As things currently stand, the state government only contributes 1 cent from every tobacco tax dollar earned to smoking cessation efforts. This has led to some understandable upset amongst anti-smoking groups in the state, who are convening to ask Gov. Chris Christie and the state legislature to step up their efforts and start contributing 10 cents of every tobacco tax dollar. This, we think, is a pretty reasonable request. If the government does agree to this, anti-smoking programs will receive $30 million to aid their efforts.
As long as there are smokers in New Jersey, there will be people suffering from the array of ills that the practice can inflict — including lung cancer, heart attacks, and emphysema, to name a grisly few. Diseases such as these are expensive for everyone involved, including doctors, insurance companies and the people suffering from them. Aside from and more importantly than the question of money, it is also an issue of human suffering. Smoking does, in fact, kill, and the state should do whatever it can to stem the tide of smoking deaths in New Jersey.
The money is clearly there to support an initiative like this. New Jersey made $750 million last fiscal year in tax money from tobacco products. The anti-smoking groups are asking for a comparatively meager $30 million of that, but think of all the good that money could bring by way of prevention campaigns and cessation aids. We know that New Jersey, like every other state in the United States, is in the midst of a financial semi-crisis, and so it needs all the money it can get. This seems like a case wherein we can safely indulge, knowing that this money would be going to an absolutely great cause.
For all the bad which smoking brings, here is a chance for tobacco to, in an odd way, give back to the community it ravages: by indirectly helping these anti-smoking groups fund the sorts of programs that will save lives and keep people from putting themselves in danger in the first place.

Ready for some creative work from the Miami Ad School? Of course you are, so listen to one of the few anti-smoking campaigns ever created that might actually work. A few students reasoned that peer pressure is in many cases (if not most) the reason that people take up the nasty habit of smoking. And, with many becoming desensitized to the prevalent gory anti-tobacco advertising, why not use that same peer pressure to encourage people to stop smoking?

Enter the “I Bet You Can Quit” mobile app, which targets smokers’ friends instead of the smoker. The only catch (and where this app potentially fails) is that the subject needs a enough of smoke-free friends who are bothered by the smoker’s habit that they’re willing to gamble actual money on his or her ability to quit. The problem with this is that smokers tend to hang out with other smokers, so this hypothetical group of concerned peers might not exist in most cases.

However, “I Bet You Can Quit” is the first original anti-smoking campaign we’ve seen in a good while. If the students behind this are lucky enough, they might achieve the same fame as the Miami Ad School students behind the “Bump a Smoke” mobile app received in June. But this time, we don’t foresee Philip Morris taking issue.

Iowa’s top tobacco-control official has lost her job after her division’s budget was slashed by two-thirds. Bonnie Mapes headed the Division of Tobacco Use Prevention and Control since 2004. She took early retirement after her boss, Public Health Director Mariannette Miller-Meeks, told her last month that her position was being terminated. Mapes and Miller-Meeks said today that the move was due to the Legislature’s decision to cut the division’s budget from $7.8 million to $2.8 million, leaving an agency that was too small to require a full-time director.

Sen. Herman Quirmbach, an Ames Democrat and strident anti-smoking voice, complained about the development in a letter released today by the Senate Democrats’ staff.

Quirmbach referred to the move as a “firing,” and wrote that he was “dismayed.”

“Miller-Meeks has told some members of the Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Commission that she intends to seek legislation to disband the division entirely and that she has little interest in developing effective tobacco control policy, despite a statutory responsibility to do so,” he wrote.

“Iowa’s Division of Tobacco Use Prevention and Control is a national model for cancer prevention,” Quirmbach wrote. “According to the American Cancer Society, Iowa’s anti-smoking efforts have resulted in a 24 percent drop in coronary heart disease, an 8 percent drop in heart attacks and a 5 percent drop in strokes. Iowa is now number two in the nation for the lowest adult smoking rate, and youth smoking rates dropped 13 percentage points from 2000-2008. Despite these remarkable successes, smoking remains the number one cause of death in our state, killing 4,400 Iowans each year.”

Mapes’ division is involved in such things as producing edgy anti-smoking ads and providing counseling and medications to Iowans who want to give up cigarettes. Some Republicans have complained about the ads, which are produced as part of the Just Eliminate Lies youth campaign, and Gov. Terry Branstad has said he does not believe they are effective.

Miller-Meeks said today that her decision to cut the division director’s position was no reflection of Mapes’ job performance. She said state leaders had been talking for several years about folding the division’s duties into other parts of the health department, and she might ask legislators next session for authority to do so.

Miller-Meeks said she needs to make anti-smoking efforts into a tight budget, and it made more sense to focus the limited dollars on such things as the Quitline Iowa counseling program and local anti-smoking organizations rather than a separate state division.

Threase Harms, a Des Moines lobbyist for the anti-smoking group Clean Air for Everyone, said Mapes’ dismissal raises questions about how serious Branstad is about his frequently stated opposition to smoking. “If they want Iowa to be the healthiest state in the nation, how are we going to do that without addressing the No. 1 cause of preventable deaths?” she said.

Tim Albrecht, a spokesman for Branstad, said the governor remains committed to combating smoking. He said the governor signed off on Miller-Meeks’ decision to terminate Mapes’ position, and he said the governor understood the need to cut programs, including the anti-smoking ads.

“Given Iowa’s severe budget constraints, most departments and agencies saw a decrease in funding,” Albrecht wrote. “Gov. Branstad believes tobacco cessation programs are important and necessary, and believes the money should be spent in a more effective manner. Blanket television advertisements, when 80 percent of the population does not smoke, is probably not the most efficient means of tobacco cessation. The governor continues to look for efficient, effective ways to educate the public on the harmful effects of smoking.”

Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, the health department’s medical director, has been named interim division director.

Edmund Tubac and Melvyn Reynado have a lot in common, aside from being councilors in Amlan town, 21 kilometers north of here. Both were heavy smokers for 40 years until they kicked the habit. They are now at the forefront of a campaign against smoking in their town. Tubac, a former policeman, stopped smoking after a third heart attack forced him to go through quadruple heart bypass surgery in 2008.

Reynado gave up smoking after his wife, a non-smoker, needed angioplasty as a result of years of inhaling second-hand smoke.
“We never thought second-hand smoke can also be deadly,” said Reynado.
Their ordeals pushed Tubac and Reynado to lead an aggressive anti-smoking campaign in their town.
They said they had to strengthen the enforcement of the ordinance because not everybody could have a chance to avail of financial help that they obtained through the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office and Negros Oriental Rep. George Arnaiz.
Tubac said his quadruple bypass was so expensive that his family would rather not discuss it openly lest he suffers another heart attack.
“This ordinance is the only help I can offer my town mates to help them stop smoking,” Tubac said.
On July 15, 2009, the Amlan municipal council passed the anti-smoking ordinance.
The law provided fines and community service as penalties.
Amlan Mayor Bentham dela Cruz said several persons had rendered community service for smoking in public places.
Dela Cruz said kicking the addiction was not easy. It took male residents a lot of convincing to stop smoking, including the prospect of not being able to kiss their wives if they reeked of cigarette odor.
As a result of the campaign, Dela Cruz said 23 town employees and a number of residents either stopped smoking in public places or had stopped smoking altogether.
Amlan residents apparently agreed with the no-smoking policy since all candidates belonging to the ticket of Mayor Dela Cruz won a third term in 2010.
The municipality of Amlan also won the national Red Orchid Award from the Department of Health last May 30 for exceeding standards set by the DOH on the anti-smoking campaign.
“The challenge now is to maintain our 100 percent rating next year. We hope it can be done,” Dela Cruz said.

Rock County Youth 2 Youth Coordinator Debbie Fischer says a recent survey by Public Opinion Strategies shows most voters would support legislation to move all tobacco products behind the sales counter. Fischer says putting the products behind the counter would influence the attitude of young people, and reduce the enticement of flavored tobacco products for even younger children.

Fischer says the survey also shows four-out-of-five respondents favored a recent decision by the Joint Finance Committee to maintain funding for tobacco prevention and control programs.