Receding Tide for Beach Smokers

Back when the Beach Boys started serenading the Southern California surf, cigarettes were as abundant on beaches as transistor radios and dark tanning oil.

Today, beach smokers assume the behavior of pariahs. They light up with shoulders hunched, turning away from others on the sand.

The other day, approached by a stranger, a young man sunbathing with friends grabbed his Marlboro Lights and sprinted to a nearby trash can.

“Cigarettes? I have no cigarettes,” he stammered, and refused to give his name -- even though he was in Redondo Beach, where smoking on the sand is legal.

Most places, it isn’t -- at least around Los Angeles.

Though most state beaches still allow smoking, in less than three years, 19 cities in four Southern California counties have quietly outlawed beach smoking in rapid succession.

In Los Angeles County, those wishing to savor a cigarette with a beach sunset will soon have just three choices: Redondo, a small beach in Palos Verdes Estates that is reached by a steep trail, and a smoker-friendly beach at Leo Carrillo State Park in Malibu.

All other beaches in the county will be smoke-free by July, when bans recently passed in Torrance and Hermosa Beach will be in effect.

Several local cities have banned smoking not only on beaches but on piers.

In Orange County, all state beaches except Corona del Mar allow smokers, but only a handful of municipal beaches do. The city of San Diego is poised to approve a ban today.

As so often happens, cities elsewhere are following California’s lead.

Cocoa Beach may become Florida’s first city to ban beach smoking, and the Costa Brava town L’Escala in Spain restricted beach tobacco use two months ago in what a British newspaper described as a “California-style ban.”

Such restrictions represent a new horizon for anti-smoking groups because they don’t involve enclosed places such as offices or restaurants, but large, well-ventilated areas outdoors.

The beach-smoking bans have succeeded largely because separate interest groups pulled together to support them.

Health-conscious residents have lobbied in favor of clean air and against noxious cigarette smoke.

Environmentalists and surfers have called for clean beaches and for offshore waters untainted by cigarette butts.

“It’s secondhand smoke, it’s littering, it’s protecting the children, it’s the marine environment,” said Debra Kelley, a vice president at the American Lung Assn. of San Diego and Imperial Counties.

Other experts have joined the fray, including Joan Waddell of Torrance, a drug addiction counselor who works on tobacco issues for the local office of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

Waddell, who fought for the Torrance and Hermosa Beach bans, is now turning to Redondo Beach and Palos Verdes Estates. She speaks with the heartfelt intensity of a reformed 35-year smoker who lost a mother to emphysema and an aunt to lung cancer.

“I have a lot of dear friends who have died as a result of cigarette smoke,” Waddell said. “I have a real passion for this.”

After decades of restrictions, smokers, meanwhile, seem to have lost their passion for a fight. They have not shown up at meetings in large numbers. They have no allies.

On a recent afternoon, only a handful of beachgoers could be seen smoking near the Redondo Beach Pier. Accustomed to banishment, they all said they would readily snuff out their cigarettes upon request or if the law required it.

Some fretted that they might be breaking the law already. Some seemed downright embarrassed when questioned, and several declined to comment publicly.

Steve and Crystal Lee, diners at a Korean restaurant overlooking the sand, said that though they both enjoy smoking, they will abide by the law.

“If they say you cannot smoke, I won’t smoke,” said Crystal Lee, 47, of Los Angeles, who already refrains from smoking near children.

Several beachgoers said they smoke for the same reason that they come to the beach -- because it’s relaxing, or at least it used to be.

Juan Torres, 23, of Lynwood, said he was smoking on one South Bay beach last year when a police officer approached.

“He told me to turn it off. I turned it off,” said Torres, a young father in T-shirt and jeans, with a crystal earring in one ear, who held his Newport behind his back to keep the smoke away from his 2-year-old daughter.

Longtime Marlboro smoker Rick Strause, a tanned 53-year-old electrician and carpenter from Torrance, downplayed the dangers of smoking as he used a pocket knife to slash open the belly of a squirming halibut and then scooped out its innards.

Strause had been on the pier for hours, pole-fishing.

In his mind, fishing and smoking are intertwined. He described how fishermen gather at night along the pier railing and talk about fishing, their cigarette ends glowing red in the dark.

“If you really get down to it, why don’t you talk about the exhaust from all those car engines?” he asked.

Anti-smoking groups trace the origins of smoking restrictions to the mid-1990s, when the city of Honolulu banned smoking at Hanauma Bay, and the town of Sharon, Mass., approved a ban at city beaches, parks and ball fields.

The movement picked up speed in 2003 when Solana Beach, north of San Diego, crafted the state’s first ban. The City Council acted after high school students collected an estimated 6,000 cigarette butts from local beaches, stuffed them in a large glass jar and displayed them at a council meeting.

Councilman Joe Kellejian, Solana Beach’s mayor at the time, said that he never expected the ban would pass.

“Here in our little town?” he said. “I was expecting the tobacco companies to come in, maybe the Chamber of Commerce or some convention and visitors bureau in the area. But when this came before us, there was no negative comment. No one spoke against the ordinance.”

Bans soon followed in other beach cities and at beaches operated by Los Angeles County.

“It was the right time, and there were like-minded activists working in a number of communities. It had reached that tipping point,” said Robert Berger, president of Healthier Solutions, a Santa Monica-based health advocacy group, and former president of the Los Angeles County Smoke-Free Beach Task Force.

Only a few area beach cities have chosen not to enact bans, including Redondo Beach, Ventura and Encinitas. The most notable holdout is the state Department of Parks and Recreation, which still allows smoking at the state beaches it oversees.

An Assembly bill to declare state beaches smoke-free was opposed by tobacco industry lobbyists and died in the Senate two years ago, but anti-smoking forces predict a state ban is inevitable.

The remaining advocates of smokers’ rights promise to keep fighting.

“How can there conceivably be an outdoor risk? There’s not,” said Norman E. Kjono, a board member of Forces International, a group opposed to anti-tobacco regulations.

And Robert Best of Ventura calls the beach bans insulting to the minority of state residents who smoke.

“We pay taxes for these beaches,” said Best, state coordinator for a smoking rights group called the Smoker’s Club. “These areas were set aside for the public to enjoy, and now they’re saying, no, you can’t go enjoy them because you’re a smoker.”

Supporters of smoke-free beaches caution that cities without bans run the risk of being stigmatized as the ashtrays of Southern California -- anathema for the sort of nervous modern-day beachgoers who favor sunblock with a rating of SPF-60.

No wonder the Orange County Health Care Agency is preparing a report about beach smoking bans for county supervisors, and Morro Bay approved a ban on June 12 with fines up to $1,000 for scofflaw smokers.

In Redondo Beach, Mayor Mike Gin chooses his words carefully. He does not think his city is in danger of becoming a smokers’ enclave. Nor would he want local lifeguards to be diverted from saving swimmers’ lives to patrol for butts.

Still, he said, a smoke-free beach “is something, frankly, that I’m open to learning more about.”