NEW YORK -- One excuse is always better than three. This is a point the great dramatist David Mamet makes again and again in his books on the theater. It is far, far better to say that your dog ate your homework than to say that your dog ate your homework and you really didn't feel like doing it anyway.
So it is with the smoking ban, which is set to take effect July 23 across New York State. There is not one convincing, compelling reason for it. Instead there are many unconvincing, uncompelling reasons. Lawmakers hope voters will find one they like. The story isn't working, just as Mamet would have predicted.
In New York City, anti-smoking legislation is Mayor Michael Bloomberg's pet project. Last August, an unnamed official from his administration, speaking of the proposed ban, told The New York Times: "The mayor will push this for all the same reasons he pushed the cigarette tax. He makes changes to things that he thinks are important."
And he has. But since you can't just declare these things by fiat -- or can you? -- there had to be an excuse. Or three.
The cigarette tax was presented, sometimes, as a way to raise revenue. Other times, Bloomberg sold it as a way to keep children from smoking -- just price them (and other low-income people) out of the market. Both are valid claims, but it is unclear whether the tax has accomplished either one.
What is clear is that, like Prohibition, the tax has given rise to a huge black market, this time in cheaper cigarettes from other states, undercutting mom-and-pop corner stores throughout the city. I met a man a couple of weeks ago who buys 1,500 cartons a week in Virginia and distributes them at bars across Brooklyn and Queens -- even though, since April 1, smoking has been illegal in the vast majority of those bars.
Why is smoking illegal in those bars? Because Bloomberg and his health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, wanted it to be illegal. This time, though, the objects of mayoral solicitude were bartenders and cocktail waitresses.
"Honestly," said Nick Caniglia, the burly bartender at Plaka Cafe, a Greek bar in Astoria, Queens, "it's the dumbest thing ever." Floor-to-ceiling windows covered two of the four walls of the place. They were all open. A breeze pushed in the way it would under a beach canopy.
"I could line up fifty of my friends on the sidewalk," Caniglia said, "and they could all be smoking and it would be legal, but we can only have four smoking tables outside, and even then the awning has to be up." No cigarettes are allowed inside. That night, a balmy Thursday, there were three patrons.
Evan, the owner of Tupelo, a hipster joint nearby, gestured around his bar with an unlit cigarette. There were 10 or so drinkers huddled in booths amid the blaring punk rock, and another five huddled outside on the sidewalk, smoking, like the shivering clusters of office workers you see outside the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan. "It has really killed business," Evan said. "It just kills the atmosphere. If you smoke you're constantly getting up and leaving. It's boring." He looked at his cigarette, looked at the door, and left.
In Scorpio, a Croatian cafe-bar a block away, nearly everyone was smoking, and the place was packed. There were even -- horror -- three little girls playing foosball, oblivious to the haze. "Smoking is permitted" signs were posted conspicuously, ostentatiously even. How did bartender-owner Denis Lisica manage such heresy? By firing all his waitresses, the very people Bloomberg was trying to protect. (There is a loophole in the law that allows smoking in owner-run establishments with no employees.)
When a place as venerable as the Plaza Hotel's Oak Bar lies to get around the ban -- it didn't work -- you know that it isn't good for business. "Big tobacco" isn't tearing people off their barstools or locking people in their apartments to make the measure look bad. People just don't like it. As Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio of Queens said after the state law was passed, "You cannot tell the people of this state how to run their lives."
Proponents of smoking bans say a lot of things in favor of them. The state ban will save New York's health care system $6.4 billion a year, according to Republicans in the Senate, though how they arrived at that figure is unclear. Others claim it will deter tobacco use, though that too is far from certain. Bloomberg says it will protect workers from secondhand smoke (when they are not fired). Nonsmokers like not having to wash their hair and their clothes when they get home from a night of pub-crawling. But if such tasks were so onerous, why did these people go to smoky bars in the first place? And where are these party animals now that the bars are smoke-free?
We were told that the ban would ultimately be good for business, once people got used to it -- but we all know that, if that were true, more businesses would have enacted their own bans a long time ago.
Smoking is on its way out, down from 41 percent in 1965 to 23 percent today, thanks to measures that people support. Smokers and nonsmokers alike have championed bans on cigarette advertising. They have embraced public education campaigns. They have cheered class action suits against big tobacco, when those companies lie about what they're putting into their cigarettes, and have even put up with (to an extent) "sin" taxes.
What people will not tolerate is a lie.
The lie is that Bloomberg and now the Albany legislators are taking heroic action on the public's behalf. There are plenty of public health crises that are conveniently ignored because they continue to be profitable. Cars, pesticides, poverty, toxic waste, pollution, fast food and soda also kill people. The number of new diabetes cases alone rises by 20 percent a year, mainly due to skyrocketing obesity, costing the country $130 billion annually. But public schools continue to sign "pouring contracts" with soft-drink companies, companies that proceed to cover every surface with advertisements and fill every child with high-fructose corn syrup. That is called creating "brand loyalty."
Big tobacco, by contrast, is a wounded animal, and it is easy sport for politicians to pump a little more lead into it. If cigarettes are legal, then smoking should be legal. Bar owners and workers should decide for themselves how they want to handle that.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 10 2003 |