Friday, February 20, 2009
Tobacco Country Newspaper Breaks with Past, Backs NC Smoking Ban
Posted by Partnership for Prevention at 11:22 AMR.J. Reynolds helped build the city of Winston-Salem, N.C. Just repeating the city's name invokes two of the world's most popular cigarette brands. You can't get any deeper into tobacco country. Knowing all that helps you appreciate the drama associated with a Feb. 15 editorial in the Winstom-Salem Journal backing legslation that would ban smoking in virtually all enclosed workplaces and buildings open to the public in North Carolina. In a piece signed by the Journal Editorial Staff, the paper declared:
"The tobacco industry has put food on our tables; it built our hospitals, colleges and churches and supported our charities. Tobacco has been a proud, hard-working way of life for everyone from farmers to factory workers, a way of life we have long supported on this page.
"But starting today, with the full gravity of overwhelming medical evidence against second-hand smoke weighing on our judgment, we must break with the past and support further restrictions against smokers, in the interest of public health."
Strong stuff.
Labels: North Carolina, smoking, tobacco
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It is clear that separation of smokers from non-smokers combined
with air exchange technology is a complete solution to this largely
artificial problem. All it takes is regulating authorities setting the
standards for indoor air quality on passive smoke, and the technology
does the rest. Such air quality standards are common in industrial
and environmental contexts. But, to date, no country in the world has
set them for smoking areas. It seems clear that the reasons are not
scientific, nor are they economic or technical: they are political.
As to the annoyance of smoking, a compromise between smokers and non-smokers
can be reached, through setting a quality standard and the use of modern
ventilation technology.
Air ventilation can easily create a comfortable environment that removes not
just passive smoke, but also and especially the potentially serious
contaminants that are independent from smoking.
Thomas Laprade