Is Smoking in Public on Its Last Gasps? : Tempers Flare as Anti-Cigarette Forces Wage an All-Out War

You glide into that reception like you’re docking the QE2. Pause a moment to peruse the murmuring throng. Your hand slips to the breast pocket . . . but wait. Can it be? Nobody’s smoking? Oh, but there’s. . . . No, hell, it’s a candy dish. You notice a couple of heads swiveling anxiously. Nobody wants to be first. You reach breastward again, but it’s no good. You’re a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen. This is nothing to be ashamed of. And yet you can’t bring yourself to light that cigarette.

And pretty soon there you are in your best suit, skulking between the fire exit and a dumpster full of fish parts, having your sullen smoke and wondering when the fun went out of it. Wondering if you’re really seeing the last gasp for the habit that’s had America by the throat for 500 years--ever since a puzzled Chris Columbus, on Nov. 6, 1492, took note in his journal of “women and men, with a firebrand in the hand, and herbs to drink the smoke thereof, as they are accustomed.”

‘Victimless’ Crime

And so we were for centuries, what with four out of five doctors concurring and not a cough in a carload. Even the cancer reports--scary, sure, but what the heck, it wouldn’t be you and besides, wasn’t it a sort of victimless crime?

But then came the mid-’70s, the liberation movement boom, and people you’d never heard of seemed to have rights you’d never imagined. “Back as early as ‘79,” says a former three-pack-a-day man, “I’d begun to feel myself to be part of a tiny, embattled minority. Indeed, what with gay rights and women’s lib in the mainstream, smokers had become the last social group which it was acceptable to despise.”

Overnight, it seemed, the nation developed an epidemic palsy of subnasal hand-waggling; smoker-baiting became a nasty cocktail party amusement; gust-engulfed restaurant patrons, coughing ostentatiously, pounced with incendiary relish on hapless tobacconites five tables away. Monstrously ironic “Thank You for Not Smoking” signs became ubiquitous as Kliban kitties. Puffers retreated into a war zone mentality, their social lives the first casualties.

First Thing Noticed

“Smoking!” growls a 32-year-old Alexandria, Va., woman, an executive at a national association and a hearty smoker. “It’s the first thing men notice. I could look like Cybill Shepherd or a German shepherd--it doesn’t matter at all!

“I kind of view myself as an easygoing person. But I still get ticked off when I go into somebody’s house and don’t see ashtrays. So you ask, and they make a big production of searching all over the place, rattling the cabinets. And finally they hand you the lid to some old jar, and say, ‘Here--I guess you can use this.’ ”

Not that she’s even safe at home. “I was having a dinner party one night, eight, 10 people, and I light up a cigarette. This young woman next to me, somebody’s date, she says, ‘Excuse me, but smoke bothers me.’

“I said, ‘Well, excuse me, but this is my own house!’ Can you believe it?”

In the past three months, the climate of opinion has grown even more hazardous to smokers’ mental health--starting with Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s December pronouncement about the dangers of secondhand or “sidestream” smoke on nonsmokers.

Scarcely had the first wheeze of shock subsided when Chicago-based USG Acoustical Products told its 2,000 employees that where there’s smoke, you’re fired: All workers would have to quit smoking (at the office and at home) and would be given pulmonary-function tests to ensure compliance. Then in February new restrictive regulations went into effect for 890,000 federal workers in 6,800 buildings owned or leased nationwide by the General Services Administration. A few days later, talk show host Larry King--who smoked slightly more than Gary, Ind.--had a heart attack at 53.

Then on March 9, Cambridge, Mass., joined a growing list of cities (prominently including Beverly Hills, Calif., and Aspen, Colo.) that have banned smoking in most public places.

And mass consciousness is due to ratchet up another notch on May 7, when New York State’s new regulations go into effect, severely restricting smoking in public places and requiring employers to provide a smoke-free environment for workers requesting it.

(Actually, even the most Draconian of the new ordinances seem outright timid compared with 17th-Century New England’s. In 1646, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law forbidding settlers to smoke unless they were on a journey of five miles or more from any town, which makes walking a mile for a Camel look positively pedestrian. And the following year, a Connecticut statute limited tobacco use to once a day in the smoker’s home--”and then not in company with any other.”)

“It’s the No. 1 etiquette problem today,” says Judith (Miss Manners) Martin, and no one knows that better than the television industry, which has filtered so much smoke from the airwaves that many barroom or nightclub scenes now look downright improbable (though fastidious watchers of the Johnny Carson show say they have seen errant cloudlets just after commercial breaks).

Smokeless ‘Sonny’

And now TV has lost the last high-tar star in prime time: Don Johnson of “Miami Vice.” NBC was deluged with complaints that he was Setting a Bad Example for Youth, and “we were very frustrated,” says Ralph Daniels, NBC’s vice president for broadcast standards. Johnson was an off-screen smoker, and “we just couldn’t get him to quit. But eventually he agreed,” and viewers will be seeing a smokeless Sonny soon.

Not surprisingly, enthusiasm is growing among anti-smoking forces, from the acronymic army--CATS (Citizens Against Tobacco Smoke), ASH (Action on Smoking or Health), GASP (Group Against Smoking Pollution) and so forth--to the associations for your heart, lungs and other imperiled giblets.

“It’s no longer an ‘if’ question,” says Robert Rosner of the Seattle-based Smoking Policy Institute, “It’s a when question.” With public attitudes shifting, says Ahron Leichtman, president of CATS, “we’re not perceived anymore as these weirdo freaks.”

Won’t Date Ex-Smoker

Or particularly reticent. “I’d rather date a man with herpes than one who smokes,” said a prominent Washington journalist. And Ben Nields, 32, a Washington-area anti-smoking activist, has even more stringent standards. He won’t even date an ex-smoker for fear she might restart. In fact, “there have been a couple of people I’ve gone out with--they never smoked themselves, but they had a parent who smoked. I got to thinking, I don’t really want an in-law who smokes.” The relationship was doomed. “So I told this one lady, ‘When your mother dies, let me know.’ That obviously broke it up.”

And now across the country, the nation’s remaining 55 million to 60 million smokers are finding themselves beset with a new arsenal of insults from mere irritables to outright humiliations. When Fidel Castro swore off his trademark stogies last year as an example to Cuban men, he predicted that “there are going to be many women who will fight with their husbands.” He didn’t know the half of it. The growing zeal of anti-fumatory partisans and the often desperate intransigence of smokers are now colliding everywhere, not sparing even those intimate venues traditionally exempt from larger social forces:

A 30-year-old Virginia woman with six brothers and sisters would love to look forward to seeing her family. But she’s allergic to smoke and asthmatic to boot. And “two out of seven children are chain smokers.” So when the siblings convene at their parents’ home in Pennsylvania for Christmas or Thanksgiving, cigarettes “just spoil the vacation,” she says.

If there is one institution in contemporary life wherein smoking is not simply accepted but virtually cherished, it is Alcoholics Anonymous. For those who have painfully squeezed the liquor from their lives, “you can’t just kick away their last addictive crutch,” says an AA veteran. So by immemorial tradition, meetings are conducted amid the squeaking of styrofoam cups and thick blue clots of smoke. Yet one Washington-area group, which has kept the same core participants for eight years, finally broke up recently--over smoking.

Smoking Policies

Smokers may be burned, if current trends in the workplace hold. Smoke containment is now so urgent an issue that it “has become a design criterion” for new offices, says Frank Hammerstrom, senior principal at the Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum architectural firm in New York. Some companies are installing filters and reorganizing their space to accommodate smokers. (As of last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, 36% of employers had smoking policies in effect, and another 21% were considering them.)

But that’s a stopgap solution, as more and more outfits opt for open work spaces and modular “systems” furniture. “What I expect to see,” Hammerstrom said, “is that in the open-plan areas they will simply eliminate smoking entirely. The snowball is now at the top of the hill.”

And it’s rolling toward federal employees, too. The GSA’s new smoking restrictions were timed to coincide with a push to consolidate agency offices from numerous leased spaces into fewer central locales and open-design areas using less floor space. “With systems furniture,” GSA administrator Terence Golden said last fall, “we can save 40 square feet per person on average.” Which means, in an office with nine-foot ceilings, more than 350 cubic feet less air space per person.

Hiring Nonsmokers

So woe, nowadays, to the job applicant who is puffing something besides himself. In a recent national survey of 1,000 executives, 73% said that if an applicant smoked during an interview, it reduced his chances of getting hired. “There’s a clear trend toward people who definitely feel real strongly about” hiring nonsmokers, says a spokesman for Thomas, Whelan Associates, a Washington executive placement firm.

Within the past two years, said Chuck Cherel, president of Professional Search Personnel, “all of a sudden we’re getting requests for nonsmokers. And we’re getting applicants who say they will only accept a smoke-free environment.”

That’s the subject of a pack of bills before Congress. In the House, there is legislation proposed to restrict smoking to designated areas in all U.S. government buildings; to prohibit smoking on domestic commercial flights, and to amend the IRS code to disallow tax deductions for advertising or promotion of tobacco products.

In the Senate, pending legislation would prohibit smoking in public conveyances and in the Senate wing of the Capitol; another bill would dump the tax deduction, increase the cost of tobacco products at military bases and double the tax on cigarettes.

(According to a 1985 staff memo from the Office of Technology Assessment, the federal cost of treating smoking-related diseases “amount to about $4.2 billion in 1985 or about 14 cents for each pack of cigarettes.”)

The Federal Aviation Administration has yet to take action on smoking in the air, despite a study by the National Academy of Sciences, released last August, that found that separate seating sections do not protect nonsmokers from cigarette smoke. Now the Joint Council of Flight Attendant Unions is backing federal legislation to ban smoking on many flights.

“People have probably noticed that they’re falling asleep more on airplanes,” says Mary Ellen Miller, health and safety director for the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants, “and they figure they’re just more tired or getting older. Actually, the air is putting them to sleep.” Drained of normal oxygen content and saturated with carbon di- and monoxides, the recycled cabin air can get so bad, Miller says, “that pilots tell us if we’re feeling extraordinarily tired, to come and let them know and they’ll turn up the power packs”--that is, the fresh-air intake system.

The anti-smoking furor continues despite the tobacco companies’ considerable efforts to encourage smoker self-assertion--redolent in its bluff futility of the last Ptolemaic sniping against the encroaching Copernican universe. As R. J. Reynolds puts it on the inside of its cartons: “If you have decided to smoke, you have the right to enjoy smoking without being harassed.” RJR (which, at the tour desk of its Winston-Salem, N.C., plant, has a sign that reads: “Thank You for Smoking”) calls this a “fact.” The Tobacco Institute, the Washington-based trade association that represents tobacco manufacturers, is somewhat more ecumenical: “The smoker has a right to enjoy something that gives him pleasure, and the nonsmoker has a right to avoid being annoyed by cigarette smoke . . . neither group has 100% of the rights.”

In fact, there are precious few “rights” to go around. In some circumstances, collective-bargaining agreements may contain provisions allowing smoking in the workplace; in many jurisdictions, while such agreements are in effect, an employer cannot unilaterally impose a smoking ban. But aside from that, the current state of the law apparently does not recognize a “right to smoke.”

In the past 10 years, smokers have declined from 37% of the adult population (42% of males and 32% of females in 1976) to 30% today. Per-capita annual consumption of cigarettes hit an all-time high in 1963 (4,345 units, about 12 a day) though the total number sold did not peak until 1981 at 634 billion. Since then, sales have dropped below 600 billion and per-capita intake is down to 3,378 (around nine a day, roughly the 1949 figure). In fiscal 1984, federal, state and local taxes on that wad amounted to more than $10 billion.

More Money, Less Smoke

Though tobacco pervades every demographic niche, it is generally true that the more money and education you have, the less likely you are to smoke. (With one conspicuous exception: women who work outside the home, including a disproportionately large number of professional women.) Widows and the unmarried constitute the lowest percentage of users, separated or divorced persons the highest by a substantial margin. High school girls smoke more than boys, blacks more than whites--not surprising, perhaps, given the amount of its $2-billion yearly ad expenditure the industry aims at young women and minorities. (And raising the nightmare query: If a company refused to hire smokers, would it constitute de facto discrimination?)

Various subgroups choose to smoke for a bewildering variety of reasons--not all of them amenable to logic or social pressure. For example, in Utah only about 16% of the total adult populace smokes, “yet the rate of smoking for non-Mormon women,” says Rosner of the Smoking Policy Institute, “is 40%.” The reason? “It’s the easiest way,” Rosner believes, “to prove you’re not a Mormon.” Similarly, he has found that nurses have a surprisingly high smoking rate. “They’re in the high 20s,” said Rosner, “whereas doctors are at 6% to 10%.” After asking around a bit, he found out why: “If they’re off having a cigarette, they won’t be disturbed. One nurse told me, ‘I don’t really like smoking, but it’s the only way I can get people off my back.’ ”

Meanwhile, as the national clamor continues, even some of the hard core is softening. A Washington journalist recently jumped into a Windsor cab. The interior was festooned with the familiar “No Smoking” signs. Yet there was the driver smoking away like a Weber grill full of cheap pork chops. The signs, it turned out, were for the passengers only. “In the winter time,” the sheepish cabbie explained between lung-loads, “the windows are closed, and four or five of ‘em get in here and they all start puffin’ at once. I just can’t stand it.”