Smoking Ban Approved by Supervisors : Government: Board cites health concerns in voting unanimously for measure affecting stores, businesses and restaurants in county’s unincorporated areas. The new rules won’t apply within cities.

With few exceptions, smokers who work, dine or shop in unincorporated Orange County will be forced outside to light up under regulations approved Tuesday by a nonsmoking Board of Supervisors.

The unanimous vote initiates a smoking ban in restaurants, retail stores and businesses, to be complete by 1995.

Representatives of the tobacco industry did not attend the 90-minute hearing, where 35 people came forward with grim public health statistics and personal stories. They included a 15-year-old boy who said he had only recently kicked a two-year habit.

“Tobacco kills 440,000 people each year,” said Brandon Miller of Anaheim’s Canyon High School, his face barely visible over the lectern, “and I would not want any of those people to be my friends.”

Miller, who cited county Health Care Agency death rates, said he quit after taking a class where an instructor warned of the health risks.

Only one person in the crowd, Al Jock of Santa Ana, spoke against the new ordinance, denouncing it as an unnecessary invasion by government into a private concern.

“It’s an example of robotizing . . . and computerizing everything into a neat social order,” Jock said. “Smoking is being blamed for all kinds of deaths because it’s easy to blame it on smoking. I say to this ordinance, no. Not only no, but hell no!”

Jock’s dissent, however vocal, went for nothing in a Hall of Administration room packed with parents, physicians, former smokers and advocates of tighter restraints on tobacco use.

On a board that includes three former smokers--including Thomas F. Riley, who Tuesday confessed to a three-pack-a-day habit until 1975--the vote was really never in doubt.

“To those who suggest that this is government sticking its nose into the private sector, I would simply say that all people in this economy pay the price for health care resulting from secondhand smoke,” Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez said. “There is just so much evidence in support of this.”

The new regulations will force restaurants with seating capacities of 50 or more to increase nonsmoking areas from 20% to 75% of capacity by February. The total ban takes effect in January, 1995. Smaller restaurants will impose the ban by February, 1994.

Since the ban applies only to unincorporated areas of the county, officials estimated that only about 100 restaurants will be affected. Areas in which the ban will apply include Sunset Beach, North Tustin and El Modena.

Except in private offices where all employees are smokers, the ordinance eliminates smoking within every building by early next year. That includes rooms now designated as smoking areas. The rules also prohibit smoking in county government vehicles and retail stores, and ban tobacco sales from vending machines within the county’s unincorporated areas, all by early next year.

Violators of the new ordinance will face fines of up to $100 per infraction. Existing smoking policies enforced by 22 city governments will not be affected by the new county law.

Mike Rhodes, president of the Orange County division of the California Restaurant Assn., said last week that while the organization generally approved of smoking bans, the group would have preferred the state to pass legislation that would apply across California.

Neither Rhodes nor representatives of his group spoke before the board Tuesday.

Those in the anti-smoking crowd urged immediate action by the board.

“Smokers and nonsmokers alike would be shocked if someone came into this chamber and sprayed around benzene and asbestos,” both recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency as dangerous carcinogens, said Dr. Jack Hackney, a professor of medicine at USC. “But, in effect, that’s what smokers do.”

Jim Walker, a neighborhood leader in the Santa Ana community of Sandpointe, described tobacco use as “public enemy No. 1. Anything less than describing this as a clear and present danger is to deny a very serious problem.”

Tash Sogg of the Orange County Tobacco Use Prevention Coalition said the county’s action reflected a much-needed social change.

“Tobacco use is the single most preventable cause of death,” Sogg said. “We can no longer depend on our own nonsmoking behavior to protect our children from illness and death from tobacco-related diseases.”

Last year, a study by the UC San Francisco School of Nursing estimated that 20% of all deaths in Orange County are related to tobacco use.

County health officials said tobacco use causes more deaths in the county than alcohol, accidents, AIDS, suicide, homicide, illegal drugs and fires combined.

Rick Greenwood, the county’s deputy public health officer, said Tuesday that secondhand smoke is listed specifically as the cause of 3,000 cases of lung cancer and 32,000 cases of heart disease each year in nonsmokers in the United States.

“The numbers are really staggering,” Greenwood said.