free news about cigarettes

http://www.startribune.com

t’s as clear as the air in St. Paul restaurants and bars: People appreciate the comprehensive smoking ban that blew in with the March winds. In fact, three months after its debut, 72 percent of poll respondents favor the law, and 60 percent favor it “strongly.”

Combine that result with the unequivocal nature of the new U.S. Surgeon General’s report and you have a strong message to those who’d like to roll back the ban and re-create exceptions: Forget it.

If they haven’t decided by now, the petitioners who’ve been collecting signatures for such a ballot measure this fall should quietly close shop and let Monday’s submission deadline pass. As of this writing, Jim Farrell, executive director of the Minnesota Licensed Beverage Association and a leader in the drive, said a final decision hadn’t been made about whether to file petitions or wait until next year, when the issue might play differently.

Either way, our guess is that their time has come and gone. The latest poll, funded by a grant from the Minnesota Partnership for Action Against Tobacco, found that 73 percent of respondents do not want the St. Paul law changed.

Farrell is spirited in his enthusiasm for separate smoking rooms in bars; he clearly thinks newfangled ventilation systems, negative air pressure and closed doors can keep nonsmokers safe. But doors aren’t closed while people are coming and going — and Surgeon General Richard Carmona flatly concluded from the available research that exposure of nonsmokers to secondhand smoke “cannot be controlled by air cleaning or mechanical air exchange.”

Such schemes aim to help struggling bars. But iffy efficacy aside, they ignore another benefit of smoking bans noted in Carmona’s report: Workplace smoking restrictions lead to less smoking among workers who smoke. It also seems logical that as smoking opportunities decline, potential bar patrons, too, will tend to smoke less — or quit altogether.

In the meantime, when good public-health policy is working and people clearly accept it, there should be no going back.