Fighting Fire With Smoke

The Environmental Protection Agency’s classification of secondhand cigarette smoke as a carcinogen continues to drive the debate over smoking. An EPA study released in January found that secondhand smoke poses as great a cancer risk as asbestos, arsenic or benzene and is responsible for at least 3,000 deaths annually among nonsmokers.

The EPA’s findings have been persuasive, moving lawmakers in California and elsewhere to support new restrictions on cigarette smoking in restaurants, office buildings and other work sites. In Los Angeles, for instance, the city has passed a law banning smoking in restaurants. That’s a noble move, but it would be better if the Legislature approved the bill of Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Brentwood) prohibiting smoking in the workplace statewide.

The EPA report has also increased the pressure on U.S. airlines to ban smoking on international flights. Smoking has been forbidden on domestic U.S. flights since 1990 but is still permitted on U.S. carriers’ flights between countries. The Clinton Administration correctly backs implementation, through bilateral talks, of a U.N. accord proscribing smoking on all international flights by 1996.

Some foreign carriers, including Air Canada and Cathay Pacific, already bar smoking on some or all international flights. Some U.S. airlines report an increase in complaints about smoking aboard international flights since the EPA’s report was published. Smoke also hinders air-filtering systems of airliners, reducing the circulation for passengers throughout the planes.

The tobacco industry increasingly recognizes the EPA’s findings could do what decades of public service announcements about smoking failed to do--dramatically change laws governing smoking. As such, nervous cigarette makers feel themselves backed into a corner.

Not surprisingly, then, they are lashing out. In a federal suit filed Tuesday, a coalition of tobacco groups wants the EPA report declared null and void. The EPA was biased in its use of scientific findings, the industry contends. “The science” of cigarette smoking in humans “is complex,” say the cigarette makers. Perhaps. But the personal and financial cost of smoking-related diseases is quite clear.