EDITORIAL: Clear Away the Smoke
Pass Smokefree Workplace Legislation

Excerpts from the Idaho Mountain Express, 2/20/04

Smoking kills people. Everyone knows that. What everyone doesn’t know are the gruesome details of the progressively debilitating effects of smoke induced emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease on the human body. They are not pretty and they are devastating.

But at least the smoker has a choice whether to light up and inhale smoke with its addictive nicotine and 4,000 different compounds, some 60 of them known or suspected to cause cancer.

It’s the rest of us in the vicinity of smokers who have no choice in the matter. At least 3,000  Americans who don't smoke die of lung cancer as a result of secondhand smoke each year. An undetermined number of others die of heart disease caused by other people’s smoke.

The foul smell, health costs, economic losses and human misery caused by second hand smoke are incalculable.

That’s why we applaud the Idaho Senate for passing Senate Bill 1283 last week, in favor of a statewide ban on smoking in most public places.

That’s why we salute Sen. Brent Hill, R-Rexburg, who championed this bill, argued long and forcefully for it on the Senate floor, and saw it pass by a margin of 22-13. Hill knows something about the ghastly details of lung cancer. His 28-year-old son Ritchie has the disease and Hill believes it was caused by secondhand smoke.

That’s why we recognize the practical and common sense of Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, who said in arguing for passage of the bill while pointing out smoking’s part in the rising costs of health insurance, "You want to curb heart disease, you need to vote for this bill. You want to curb cancer, you need to vote for this bill."

That’s why we praise and encourage the 22 Senators who voted for SB 1283, and shake our heads (and fingers) at the 13 who voted against it.

Second hand smoke is obnoxious to those who do not wish to breathe it because, among other reasons, their very nervous systems know it can kill them.