A Breath of Fresh Air

Next time you come home after a night of boozing and bar hopping, you won’t have to smell like a chain smoker. The Boston Health Commissioners voted last week to ban smoking in all restaurants, bars and nightclubs. This change is an important step in helping curb an awful habit; tobacco-related illnesses are the leading cause of death in the United States. In addition, this new rule will ensure that all Bostonians, not just those in downtown office buildings, will have the right to work in a smoke-free environment.

Second-hand smoke is a killer. It contains over 40 different known carcinogens and has been shown by the Association for Research on Cancer to be a direct cause of lung cancer in non-smokers. Exposure to second-hand smoke in the workplace increases one’s risk of developing lung cancer by 16 to 19 percent, and estimates by the National Cancer Institute indicate that in America over twice as many people die every year as a result of second-hand smoke as do from AIDS.

Ensuring that all hospitality workers can work free of life-threatening second-hand smoke is a major success for public health that will not impose a major economic burden on Boston’s restaurants, bars or nightclubs. A recent survey of sales tax data in over 80 cities and towns published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that restaurant revenues were not affected by laws restricting smoking. Even in Beverly Hills, the first city in California to enact a complete restaurant smoking ban, sales tax data indicates that there was no subsequent drop in restaurant revenue.

Boston is participating in an important state- and nation-wide effort to curb smoking in public places. Over 70 other cities and towns across Massachusetts already have strict anti-smoking legislation, and New York is expected to impose even stricter restrictions than Boston at a city council meeting on Wednesday. If all U.S. workplaces became smoke-free, according to a study published in Tobacco Control, over 175,000 smokers would quit and over 10 billion fewer cigarettes would be consumed every year.

But stricter workplace smoking restrictions should only be one part of a comprehensive program to cure the smoking epidemic. Boston should also raise cigarette taxes to New York’s level, which would both decrease the number of smokers as well as the number of cigarettes smokers consume. Preliminary data from the Big Apple indicates that increased cigarette sales in the surrounding areas and on the black market have not compensated for the decline of cigarette sales in the city itself.

Making it illegal to light up in any of Boston’s 2,263 watering holes will make Boston’s gathering places safer, and certainly more pleasant. Bostonians should welcome the new rule and revel in the healthier, tobbacco-free air they will soon enjoy.

Dissent: No New Cigarette Taxes

The Staff is right in applauding the ban on smoking in Boston’s eating establishments, a move which will surely have beneficial affects on the employees of the city’s thousands of restaurants, bars and nightclubs who have the same right as any other worker to a smoke-free workplace.

However, the idea of increasing the taxes on cigarettes is a move that will unfairly hurt the low-income communities who are already suffering most from the terrible effects of cigarette addiction. Any tax on goods that are widely consumed at a flat rate make the biggest difference in the lives of those with the smallest incomes, but taxing cigarettes is particularly detrimental precisely because nicotine is an addictive substance. If a tax on soda were imposed, it would be easy enough for people to switch to drinking another beverage, but cigarettes have no “substitute good.” Those with higher incomes can afford insurance programs that have quitters support groups, offer “nicotine replacement” gums or patches, and in some cases provide prescription medicines to end the addiction. Those with low incomes have no such luxuries; with this tax they will have even less money for their families. As Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) has said about cigarette taxes, “All you’re really doing is making life harder for the little guy.”

—Ronaldo Rauseo-Ricupero ’04