The Real Motivation Behind Park And Beach Smoking Bans Jul 22nd 2013, 08:00
A sign announcing 'No smoking withing the park' is set up at the entrance of Lower Manhattan's Battery Park. A smoking ban is in effect in all New York City parks. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
Campaigns to restrict smoking in public places first emerged in the 1970s and have continued to expand apace over the past 3 decades. Over this time period there has been a dramatic change in the landscape – many states and municipalities now have statutes prohibiting smoking in public buildings, bars and restaurants, schools, hospitals, and other venues.
These laws and statutes were largely justified by reference to the 1993 EPA report that classified secondhand tobacco smoke as a Class A (human) carcinogen. Although that report stuck many scientists as putting activism above a careful reading of the evidence, there is no question that it achieved the intended aim of providing an official sanction – a founding text — for statutes protecting nonsmokers from the allegedly lethal effects of breathing other people's tobacco smoke.
Proponents of smoking bans have been remarkably effective, and, as a result, there are fewer and fewer places where smokers can light up. As the historian of the smoking epidemic of the twentieth century, Allan Brandt has remarked, smokers may soon have "nowhere left to hide." The spread of smoking restrictions has gone hand-in-hand with a decline in the proportion of the smoking population by more than half, from 42% to around 20%.
With the achievement of smoke-free environments in most indoor or enclosed settings, increasingly restrictions on smoking have been extended to parks, malls, and beaches. The number of bans on smoking in parks grew steadily from 0 in 1993 to over 843 in 2010. Similarly, the number of bans affecting beaches across the US went from 0 in 1995 to 150 in 2010.
New York City has followed this trend. As of May of 2011 smoking in any city park, pedestrian mall, or beach became illegal.
In the current issue of the journal Health Affairs, Ronald Bayer Bayer and Kathleen Bachynski, researchers at Columbia's Mailman School of Public, examine the scientific justification for these bans. The article is unusual for the authors' willingness to take an independent look at both the science and the ethics relevant to this issue.
According to the authors, three justifications are routinely offered for banning smoking in these setting:
- To protect nonsmokers from secondhand tobacco smoke;
- To protect wildlife from pollution;
- And to shield children from the bad example of smoking.
Bayer and Bachynski examined the evidence for each of these justifications and found that it was slim to non-existent. They point out that bans on smoking in these venues have tended to be the result of efforts by local environmentalists and anti-smoking activists, whereas national organizations like the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society American Cancer Society have not voiced their support. Even more tellingly, the former editor of Tobacco Control, the leading journal in this area, characterized the evidence for harm from exposure to outdoor smoke as "flimsy."
If these bans are not supported by scientific evidence, what then is their function and the logic underlying their rapid proliferation? Bayer and Bachynski conclude they are part of a concerted effort to "de-normalize" smoking– to increasingly restrict the places in which smoking can take place and thereby progressively make it less feasible and less socially acceptable – more "weird," as Bayer put it in an interview with PBS. The authors comment that "de-normalization" is a euphemism for "stigmatization."
Previously Bayer has made the case that early on, in the 1970s, even before there were any studies linking secondhand tobacco smoke to a slightly increased risk of fatal diseases, the anti-smoking movement fastened on the strategy of emphasizing the potential harm of cigarette smoke to the non-smoking by-stander. This was a clever strategy, because, as Bayer points out, it deftly side-stepped the charge of paternalism and the "nanny state," implicit in health officials exhorting smokers to quit for their own good. The argument that, by smoking, smokers were harming non-smokers proved to be an enormously effective strategy for justifying the imposing of restrictions on smoking.
As smoking has become less socially acceptable, it has gone from being viewed as merely a dirty and unhealthy habit to being seen in moral and even existential terms as revolting and disgusting, as tainted with evil and pollution. In the words of two scholars quoted by the authors, smoking – and I would add, exposure to even a whiff of tobacco smoke — has been transformed into something "so harmful that it defiles others."
Bayer and Bachinski argue that, even if the goal of progressively stamping out smoking is a worthy one – in order to reduce the hundreds of thousands of tobacco-related deaths that occur in the U.S. each year — something important is lost when a group is stigmatized and subjected to restrictions that are not based on solid evidence.
As they put it in their conclusion, "Public health must, in the end, rely on public trust. That trust is threatened when the case for interventions depends on weak evidence and involves degrees of dissimulation. Advocates for outdoor smoking bans should be candid about the limits of arguments based solely on third-party harms as they confront the lethal consequences of tobacco use."
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