Bans on Outdoor Smoking Cross a Line in the Sand

USA TODAY view on cigarettes and public health:

Prohibitions at beaches, parks lack scientific rationale.

Times just keep getting tougher for the American smoker.

As recently as the early 1980s, smoking was considered chic and socially acceptable just about everywhere. Today, smokers are about as welcome in many places as someone with swine flu.

They often seem a forlorn lot, forced to huddle in specially designated areas outside buildings. Smoking bans continue to spread, most recently to rental cars from Budget and Avis.

For the most part, the extension of "No Smoking" rules has been a very good thing. Smoking has declined from 42% of Americans adults in 1965 to just under 20%

in 2007. But the next front in the smoking wars — the great outdoors — is more problematic.

Scores of municipalities have barred smoking in outdoor public places. Now New York

is discussing a ban in its hundreds of parks and 14 miles of beaches. But the rationale that supported earlier bans — to protect non-smokers from the ill effects of secondhand smoke — is missing.

To be harmed by secondhand smoke outdoors, you have to stand right next to the smoker and in the path of his smoke. Prolonged exposure in a park is improbable.

New York's mayor, reformed smoker Michael Bloomberg, who has been laudably aggressive with anti-smoking campaigns, was right to respond hesitantly when his city health commissioner proposed this one.

The nation's change from a smoking to an anti-smoking culture was greatly accelerated by revelations in the mid-1980s that secondhand smoke could be deadly. Smokers could no longer argue they were harming only themselves. Non-smokers' rights became paramount. By that standard, the gradual banning of smoking in confined spaces — airplanes, workplaces and the like — made sense. And if a hotel or car rental chain thinks it's good business to go smoke-free, that's a competitive decision it's entitled to make.

Government-imposed outdoor bans, though, are another matter. Rather than protecting innocent victims from harm, they amount to an intolerant majority infringing the personal freedom of an unpopular minority that is harming only itself. Just as people should be allowed to smoke in their own homes (unless they live in condos or apartments that have declared themselves smoke-free), they should also be allowed to smoke outdoors, where smoke is quickly dissipated and enforcement is problematic. And though some smokers regard beaches as giant ashtrays, that's best dealt with through littering laws, not prohibitions.

From a health standpoint, the fewer people who smoke the better. Some 440,000 die each year from smoking-related illnesses, which is ample reason people should be persuaded not to take up the habit, particularly in their teen years, when nearly all smokers get hooked. Their addiction, however, should not be an excuse for persecution.

It might seem a fine line, but it's an important one, and banning smoking in airy outdoor public places crosses it.

(From the Opinion Page of USA TODAY, September 18, 2009)