Fitzsimon File

While House and Senate negotiators were holed up in separate corner rooms sending offers to settle the budget back and forth, the House Health Committee passed a bill sponsored by Rep. Rick Glazier that would ban smoking in the Legislative Building and Legislative Office Building.

There was almost no debate in the committee and the vote for the bill was unanimous. It has already passed the Senate, so now it’s only a House floor vote away from passage. The committee prompted one legislative observer to remark that “times have really changed,” a common sentiment when any bill perceived as unfavorable to the tobacco industry makes it through the legislative process.

Times may have changed, but not enough. The smoking ban in the General Assembly is an important victory for health advocates, but there is sill a lot of work to do to undo laws passed when the industry was in its heyday and ran the General Assembly, much to the detriment of public health.

One of the most important changes would be the repeal of the 1993 preemption law that prohibits local governments from passing anti-smoking ordinances stricter than a weak state standard set up in the bill. The tobacco industry demanded the legislation in 1993 to stop a movement by local governments to restrict smoking in public buildings and restaurants.   

Those were the days when not only did the tobacco industry wield its political contributions to influence the legislative process, industry funded PR machines refused to admit that smoking was harmful to your health, much less acknowledge that secondhand smoke was a problem.

The industry claims were utter nonsense then, and their efforts to avoid talking about the serious hazards of secondhand smoke are disingenuous now. Just ask the U.S. Surgeon General of the United States, who released a report this week saying that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer, heart disease, and respiratory problems and can cause serious problems in infants and children, including sudden infant death syndrome.

Last session, attempts to ban smoking in restaurants in North Carolina were defeated by an alliance of the tobacco industry and the restaurant association.  Seems like the Surgeon General just made the case to revive that legislation and to repeal the 1993 preemption bill to let local governments protect the health of their citizens.

Times need to keep on changing. The health of thousands of North Carolinians is at stake.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.