No Butts About It, Del Mar Activist Aims to Snuff Out Smoking

It may have been the barbed slurs from a tobacco industry lobbyist or it may have been the shocking sight of 9-year-olds with cigarettes dangling from their lips. Something has spurred maverick activist Richard Roe to hop back on his white horse and resurrect his campaign to impose a citywide smoking ban in this pricey seaside city.

Roe, a former Del Mar mayor and former smoker, announced with drum roll and trumpets early this year that he was going to snuff out cigarettes, cigars and pipes in all Del Mar public places--parks, beaches, city streets and sidewalks. Eight months later, absolutely nothing has happened.

Now Roe is readying a repeat performance, a fall rerun as it were, to announce the start of his initiative petition campaign to put the anti-smoking issue to a vote at a special city election.

If the initial Roe Health Initiative announcement in February did little more than raise a few eyebrows locally, it rattled a few cages in the nation’s capital, home of the Tobacco Institute, the industry’s powerful lobby.

In Washington, a defensive tobacco industry spokesman singled out Roe’s all-inclusive Del Mar smoking ban as a prime example of Californians’ abnormal behavior, describing them as “high-fiber, low-fat extremists who aren’t typical of Americans or anybody else.”

What irked Roe more was the lobbyist’s comment that “nut cases” like Roe “probably help us”--the tobacco industry--because “the more radicalized the anti-smoking zealots get, the sooner reasonable people are gonna get turned off and drop out.”

Then, there was the European business trip from which Roe recently returned.

“It was appalling. People were smoking everywhere, in buses, in restaurants, at social occasions. There were kids, 9-year-olds, smoking. And, it was socially acceptable. They (Europeans) are 10 years behind us,” Roe said of the apparent lack of concern by Europeans for their health and the well-being of their children.

Roe pleads guilty to procrastination, explaining to visitors that the press of earning a living as a publishing executive and travel have detoured him from the no-smoking initiative campaign.

Now he promises to press on, to finish gathering at least 600 petition signatures to force a special election on the measure.

“I’m optimistic,” Roe said. About 60% of the Del Mar residents he’s talked to favor the all-inclusive ban. “I believe that smokers also will back this because they want to quit, and this is one way to encourage them to do so.”

Roe rejects the opposition arguments that an outdoor no-smoking ordinance would be unconstitutional, or that it would be unenforceable.

“I have a lawyer (Del Mar attorney Peter Gamer) who assures me that there is no problem legally. And, in Del Mar, there will be no enforcement problem. Residents here are environmentally sensitive and such an ordinance would be self-enforcing.”

Del Mar has been called an elitist community, Roe said, “and in this case I would say that it is true. We don’t want people smoking here.”

There would, of course, be enclosed smoking areas where those bent on self-destruction could puff away to their hearts’ content, he said, and, of course, what people did in the privacy of their own homes is none of the public’s business.

Roe picked his battleground with care. It is his turf and he knows the people and he considers his no-smoking initiative a shoo-in, unless “the tobacco lobby pours a lot of money into fighting it.” Even so, he said, “people here pretty much make up their own minds on issues.”