They Abet Use of Tobacco, Drugs, Sponsor Says : Bill to Ban School Smoking Areas Gains

A bill to eliminate smoking areas at California high schools and to prohibit the possession and use of tobacco on school campuses easily cleared its first committee hurdle Tuesday and went to the full Assembly.

The Assembly Education Committee voted 9 to 0 to approve the measure that would repeal an 8-year-old law that gave school districts permission to set aside student smoking areas and allow pupils to possess tobacco products on campus.

About half of California’s 1,096 school districts currently allow smoking in designated areas on school grounds, said the bill’s author, Assemblyman William J. Filante (R-Greenbrae). None of the 49 high schools in the Los Angeles City School District permit smoking on campus.

The measure was sponsored by the recently formed Coalition to Ban Student Smoking in Public Schools, whose members include the state attorney general’s office, the California Board of Education and more than 30 other health and education organizations.

Saying ‘We Don’t Care’

“It’s unconscionable that anyone say minors can or should smoke, chew or anything else you can do with tobacco products,” testified Carla Lowe, coordinator of the coalition. “When we turn around and say it’s OK for our kids to smoke . . . we’re telling them that we don’t care about them.”

Lowe and other proponents contended that permission for students to smoke on campus makes a mockery both of state law, which prohibits the sale of cigarettes and tobacco products to minors, and of programs to educate students about the hazards of tobacco use.

Filante told the committee that the 1978 law caused a “significant increase in smoking and a significant correlation in the use of illicit drugs, such as marijuana.” The law that allows districts to set up campus smoking areas was adopted mainly as an attempt to move student smokers out of the school lavatories and into areas where they would not offend others.

Filante drew support from Jody Rodgers, 18, a graduate of Napa Valley High School, who told a press conference earlier that the smoking area at her former school encouraged her to begin smoking cigarettes and using drugs.

‘Led Me to Drugs’

“I started smoking when I was 14 and it led me to drugs because drugs are sold in smoking pits (areas)--a lot of them,” she said.

Mary Bergen, a representative of the California Federation of Teachers, opposed the bill on grounds that control of smoking is a “local control issue” that should be left to the governing board of each school district.

Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress), who in 1977 studied the issue when she was a local school board member, agreed in part with Bergen, asserting that “kids would be running around and sometimes wet their pants because they couldn’t find an empty bathroom. But it (the 1978 law) did not remedy the bathroom problem.”