ShawneeDispatch.com

Members of the City Council, in discussing how best to gauge public opinion on an indoor smoking ban for Shawnee businesses, spent a fair amount of time last week voicing their concerns about the rights of business owners to decide whether to allow smoking on their premises. Better they should spend their time discussing how to see to it that the employees in Shawnee businesses are not continually subjected, day in and day out, to a fog of cancer-causing substances in their workplaces.

The smoking-ban debate is not, or should not be, about whether the government should be able to prescribe the terms and conditions under which merchants shall conduct their business. The sole justification for smoking bans is the proven harm that second-hand smoke poses for workers, who are the only people in this equation who don't seem to have a choice. Employers and bar and restaurant owners can decide whether they want to allow smoking on their premises or not; customers, too, can decide which merchants they want to patronize, depending on their own smoking preferences.

But what choice do employees have? To get another job? We have not forced that decision on people who work in coal mines or steel mills or on construction sites on in oil refineries or in many other industries in which the government has established -- despite the impassioned cries of freedom-loving industrialists -- minimum standards for the health and safety of workers.

In his latest report released last year, U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona made the point that no level of secondhand smoke can be considered safe. He declared an end to the debate about the hazards of secondhand smoke.

"The science is clear: secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance but a serious health hazard," he said.

The surgeon general's advice to nonsmokers was blunt: "Stay away from smokers," he said.

It's not as if the report contained any new data, however. It is merely a compilation of the best research on the topic since the surgeon general's last report in 1986, which found -- guess what? -- that exposure to secondhand smoke increases nonsmokers' risks of lung cancer and heart disease.

The report says more than 126 million Americans continue to be exposed to secondhand smoke in homes, vehicles, workplaces and public places. Extrapolating from that figure, one can posit that about 24,500 Shawnee residents are so exposed.

According to studies by the California Environmental Protection Agency, exposure to secondhand smoke causes approximately 3,400 lung cancer deaths and 22,700 to 69,600 heart disease deaths annually among U.S. nonsmokers. Again extrapolating from the national data, that would give us one lung cancer death (OK, .6 deaths) and 4.4 to 13.5 heart disease deaths.

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study found that secondhand smoke exposure was responsible for an estimated 150,000-300,000 new cases of bronchitis and pneumonia in children aged less than 18 months. Extrapolating: 30 to 60 cases of infant bronchitis and pneumonia cases here.

One place where children are especially vulnerable to exposure to secondhand smoke is in the homes of parents or caregivers who smoke. Carmona encouraged parents who cannot kick the habit to smoke outdoors -- never in a home or in a car with children inside. Opening a window is not enough, he said.

It is only because of the history of tobacco that we're even having this debate. If these problems were associated with some new concoction, that substance would be banned outright with almost no discussion. But tobacco is different. Many of us grew up as smokers, or in the households of smokers. Even though many of our parents and grandparents may have died of smoking-related causes, the myth and aura of the Marlboro Man die hard. Smoking still seems to have some sort of deathly hold on our national psyche. And then of course there's the political reality: in many states, tobacco remains a potent political force. It's only been about three years since the federal government quit giving price supports to tobacco farmers, and the machinery of the federal government still can be summoned into action to help sell American tobacco overseas. What clearly needs to happen is that the Food and Drug Administration needs to step up and regulate tobacco, a process that would almost certainly lead to a total ban at some point. The chances of that happening right away are not great, to be sure, but one can always hope.