Strong Ban on Smoking Sent to Wilson

Culminating a long legislative battle, the Assembly on Thursday approved a strong statewide ban on smoking in restaurants and most other indoor workplaces.

After more than a year of lobbying, arm-twisting and arguing, the smoking prohibition cleared the Assembly on a 48-22 vote, and now heads to Gov. Pete Wilson. His office declined to say whether the governor will sign the measure.

The bill was authored by Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Brentwood), who originally wanted a flat-out ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces to protect the public from the effects of secondhand smoke. But Friedman ran into heavy opposition from tobacco companies.

As a result, the final version passed by the Assembly bore the markings of compromise.

Aside from restaurants, the ban covers offices, stores, factories, hospitals and other large enclosed workplaces. Exempted are bars, hotels, warehouses in which 20 or fewer employees work, and businesses that employ five or fewer employees where all agree to allow smoking and where minors are not allowed. The bill also would permit smoking in theaters and movie sets where smoking is part of the production, tobacco shops, medical research facilities looking into the effects of smoking, and nursing homes.

Friedman’s legislation retains a provision allowing cities and counties to impose tougher smoking restrictions.

“We have overcome a relentless and deceptive campaign by the tobacco companies,” Friedman said.

He added that despite the compromises added in the state Senate, the legislation will “balance the protection of workers with the accommodation of the reasonable needs of business.”

When Friedman introduced his bill last year, even his supporters doubted that he would be successful, given the tobacco industry’s long history of killing anti-tobacco bills in Sacramento.

The tobacco industry fought hard, sending teams of high-priced lobbyists from Sacramento and Washington to kill Friedman’s measure. On several occasions, it seemed as if they had succeeded, only to have Friedman line up key votes by making compromises and amending the bill.

Indicating the stakes involved, the industry-funded Tobacco Institute and the nation’s two largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris U.S.A. and R J R Nabisco, spent more than $1.5 million on lobbying and legislative campaign donations last year. They have spent more than $750,000 this year.

And the fight is not over. California voters in November will decide the fate of an initiative sponsored by Philip Morris.

The initiative would invalidate Friedman’s bill and bar local governments from enacting smoking bans. It would set up a statewide standard permitting smoking in portions of restaurants and other indoor workplaces, so long as they meet state ventilation standards. However, those standards are not intended to alleviate the health consequences of breathing other people’s smoke.

Philip Morris spent $491,000 on the petition drive to qualify the measure for the ballot.

On Thursday, Lee Stitzenberger, the consultant managing the initiative, said passage of Friedman’s bill may help his campaign.

“It may draw a more clear distinction” between the bill and the initiative, Stitzenberger said. People will have to decide, “are you in favor of something that is unfair and Draconian?”

Friedman’s big fight was in the Senate, where the measure languished for more than a year before passing last week in amended form. By the time the bill reached the Assembly, there was only token opposition.

“I will not be a party to taking away the rights of individuals to make their own choices, based on a lie,” Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) said, contending that there is no proof that secondhand smoke “actually causes health damage.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. surgeon general and various medical studies contend that there is a link between breathing secondhand smoke and lung and heart disease. Helping fuel support for Friedman’s bill was an EPA study last year that said several thousand nonsmokers die annually from secondhand smoke.

If Friedman’s measure becomes law, some in the anti-smoking movement fear that the tobacco industry will attempt to weaken the statute or that the courts may strike down some of its protections.

“The courts are liable to interpret it any number of different ways,” said Kevin Goble, of Americans for Nonsmokers Rights, a Berkeley-based group that pushes for local smoking bans. “As we’ve seen in the past, intentions don’t mean all that much.”

Many of the bill’s strongest proponents are leaving the Legislature this year, including Friedman, who is running for a Superior Court judgeship in Los Angeles.

“There will be legislative initiatives in the Assembly and Senate to weaken the bill,” said Dean Chalois, lobbyist for the California Medical Assn., one of the bill’s leading supporters. “Those of us in the coalition (supporting the legislation) will have to be on our toes to ensure that the bill remains intact.”

In another smoking-related action, the Legislature passed and sent to Wilson a measure allocating more than $800 million expected to be raised over the next two years from a special 25-cent-a-pack tax on cigarettes enacted by voters in 1988.

The legislation was approved despite protests from some opponents that money the voters meant for anti-tobacco education was being shifted to basic health services that they said should be funded by general taxes.