Pentagon Will Ban Smoking in Workplace

The military, which for years has done all it could to keep American GIs well-stocked with cigarettes, is about to join the ranks of thousands of civilian employers: It is banning smoking in the workplace, the Pentagon announced Monday.

The regulations, to take effect April 8, will eliminate designated smoking areas near thousands of offices, hallways and other facilities in Defense Department buildings around the world, including the Pentagon, where 25,000 persons work.

In all, about 4 million people--1.6 million of them in uniform and 2.4 million civil service workers in the Defense Department--will be affected, making this one of the most sweeping such orders that the federal government has imposed.

Pentagon officials said the regulation, to be signed today by Undersecretary of Defense John Deutch, comes in recognition of dozens of studies showing that smoking is harmful to health.

But the ban will not affect barracks and other living quarters, officers’ and enlisted clubs and restaurants on military installations. “Smoking still will be allowed in some areas, but the number of them will be cut back,” a Defense Department spokesman said.

Pentagon officials said the move is only the latest in a series of steps it has taken over the last decade to curtail smoking, drinking and the use of illegal drugs.

In 1986, for example, the Army and Navy imposed stringent restrictions on smoking in the military workplace, including ships, aircraft and offices.

Still, for years the services bent over backward to provide cigarettes to troops overseas. Navy ships routinely announced that “the smoking lamp” was lighted. It was out mainly during battle and the loading of fuel or ammunition.

And until relatively recently, the truly macho soldier was depicted as one who chain-smoked. World War II cartoons routinely showed GIs with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The military shipped cartons of cigarettes to the front.

The crackdown in 1986 came after surveys showed that about half the personnel in the Army and the Navy smoked, compared to about 30% of the U.S. public as a whole.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration suggested that there is “mounting evidence” that cigarette manufacturers have been lacing their products with nicotine to make them more addictive and threatened to seek to regulate the industry if it found the charges to be true.