Published: 8/4/06
In lawsuit-happy America, the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent report on secondhand smoke is tantamount to a three-minute warning for corporations, businesses and retailers who still allow smoking on the premises.
All wiggle room is gone. The report flatly states there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Even the briefest contact adversely affects the recipient’s cardiovascular system and increases the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. For workers forced to inhale other people’s smoke as a condition of employment, the chance for developing heart disease or lung cancer jumps 20 to 35 percent, the report says.
Sequestering smokers is no longer the answer. Even the most sophisticated air cleaners and ventilation systems cannot completely remove the carcinogens and toxic chemicals in secondhand smoke – some of which are detected at concentrations higher than those found in the smoke inhaled by smokers, the report says. The only way to separate nonsmokers from the dangers of passive smoke is to ban smoking entirely.
All of which should give even the most reluctant business owners edgy nightmares of lawyers reciting long litanies of such findings to alert juries. The encouraging news, though, is not the surgeon general’s gift to trial lawyers, but the fact that so many businesses, institutions and corporations have already seen the charring on the wall and instituted no-smoking policies.
Going smoke-free is all the rage in South Carolina, and the primary motivator is old-fashioned competition, not fear. In a market-driven economy, the customer rules – and retailers say the majority of their customers prefer to breathe free. More than 70 restaurants in Greenville and 55 in Spartanburg are included on the smoke-free restaurant list maintained by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control. DHEC webmasters say the numbers are growing so fast they have a hard time staying current.
Marriott International Inc. announced late last month its plans, effective in September, to ban smoking at all 2,300 of its hotels and corporate apartment properties, encompassing10 brands across North America. The ban will cover all guest rooms, restaurants, meeting rooms, lounges, public spaces and employee work areas.
Marriott spokespeople said 90 percent of their guest rooms were already nonsmoking to meet customer demand, and they expect “very positive feedback” to the new policy. That has certainly been the case for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc, which banned smoking in all 77 Westin hotels in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean as of January. Executives at Greenville’s Westin Poinsett told The Greenville News the change “has been very well received by the community and by our clients.”
The trend doesn’t stop there. The University of South Carolina went smoke-free Aug. 1, and the ban extends to within 25 feet of all university owned and occupied buildings. The Greenville Hospital System is banning the use of all tobacco products system-wide come Nov. 16,joining Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System, Anderson’s AnMed Health, Cannon Memorial in Pickens, and hundreds of other hospitals around the state.
“It’s important to set an example,” a GHS spokesman told reporters.
That’s an understatement, considering the incontrovertible evidence against tobacco-use long before the surgeon general’s tough talk. Smoking annually kills more than twice as many people as AIDS, alcohol, illegal drugs, car accidents, homicides and suicides combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control. That includes 46,000 nonsmokers who died last year of heart disease and 3,000 who died of cancer caused by secondhand smoke.
Once upon a time, smokers could say they were killing only themselves. No more. Secondhand smoke is a public health hazard. The good news, as the surgeon general says, is that exposure is easy to prevent. Smoke-free indoor environments are a necessity, not an option. And with all those trial lawyers watching, any business or institution that ignores that reality now does so at its own peril.
