AMAZING STORY: HOW BARS BECAME SMOKELESS

By Stephanie Salter
EXAMINER COLUMNIST

AMID THE whining, griping and threatened lawbreaking that have accompanied
California's most recent smoking ban, a question keeps coming up:

How the hell did something like this ever get passed?

The answer: Slowly. Against all odds. And despite millions of dollars of
tobacco industry money being hurled at it.

Californians who dislike the ban on smoking in bars describe it as
"stupid," a violation of their "civil rights" or the work of busybody
"health Nazis" who want to impose their prissy order on "everybody else."

In truth, the prohibition, which went into effect Jan. 1, is the last stage
in the implementation of a miraculous legislative endeavor intended as a
health safety measure for people who, because of their jobs, can't escape
the lethal hazards of secondhand smoke. So many political and economic
torpedoes were fired at the legislation that the law should be lying at the
bottom of the ocean, next to the Titanic.

The California assemblyman who originally launched AB13 -- a sweeping
prohibition of smoking in indoor workplaces -- has been out of the
lawmaking business since 1994. Terry Friedman, then a Democratic legislator
from Sherman Oaks, is now a Juvenile Court judge in Los Angeles.

Yet it was Friedman who introduced AB13 back in December 1992 and managed
to ferry the bill to passage on July 14, 1994. Gov. Wilson signed it into
law a week later, and most of the ban went into effect on New Year's Day
1995. The prohibition on smoking in bars and card rooms was delayed twice,
each time for a year.

He said: "The tobacco industry always kills these bills. But we had a
strong coalition of labor, business and health groups that never let down
and kept on fighting. This is a case where David slayed the tobacco
Goliath."

His imagery was only slightly hyperbolic. Despite volumes of medical
research that prove secondhand smoke kills, the tobacco industry and plenty
of Friedman's fellow legislators managed to stall the law for years.

They did this by predicting economic annihilation for much of the service
industry -- remember how legions of restaurants were supposed to go out of
business? -- and by promoting the public misconception that the ban is
about violating personal freedom, not about protecting the health of people
required by their jobs to inhale secondhand smoke for eight hours a day or
longer.

Typical of the industry's tactics was a 1993 statement by Bill Wardham, an
assistant to the president of the national Tobacco Institute. A month after
Los Angeles imposed its own smoking ban on the city's 7,000 restaurants, he
said:

"The state has a recent history of being preoccupied with health issues.
It's a beautiful state, but as in all preoccupations and fixations, they
can lead to excesses."

Preoccupations? Fixations?

In January 1993, an Environmental Protection Agency report concluded that
cigarette smoke should be classified as a human carcinogen, along with
asbestos, benzene and radon. The report said secondhand smoke leads to lung
cancer and raises the risk of pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma in children.

Last autumn, the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and
the state Air Resources Board concluded a six-year joint study. It found:

* Secondhand tobacco smoke is responsible each year for the deaths of an
estimated 4,700 to 7,900 nonsmoking Californians, including 136 infants.

* Such "passive smoking" also causes in children about 188,000 ear
infections, 36,000 cases of bronchitis or pneumonia and 3,100 cases of
asthma.

In related studies, UC-Berkeley researchers and the federal Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention looked at the health expenses of 35,000
Americans and concluded that smoking costs U.S. taxpayers about $22 billion
a year in medical expenses. An earlier CDC report by Dr. Michael Siegel
found that employees of bars breathed in smoke at a rate four to six times
higher did than other workers.

A few months after Friedman introduced AB13, researchers at UC-San
Francisco found that the tobacco industry had bestowed $7.6 million upon
state and local politicians and campaigns in 1991-92. This was 10 times the
industry's rate of spending before 1988.

In 1992, California legislators per capita received more than double the
tobacco money ($10,402) than did members of Congress ($4,225).

Up to and after its passage, AB13 stayed in its opponents' sights. It was
KO'd in various legislative committees and crippled more than once by
proposed amendments and counter bills that looked like anti-smoking laws
but were really designed to gut the power of local municipalities to impose
their own, stricter smoking prohibitions.

Perhaps the apex (or nadir) of this exercise was Proposition 188, an
alleged smoking regulation measure. It would have nullified AB13, repealed
the California Indoor Clean Air Act of 1976 and repealed and preempted all
local smoking ordinances.

The Philip Morris company alone spent $1.98 million merely to place Prop.
188 on the November 1994 ballot. According to the California secretary of
state's office, it was the most money ever spent by a single company or
person to qualify an initiative.

Prop. 188 went down to defeat, but not before Philip Morris kicked in
another $16 million.

Given the fact that smokers account for only about 18 percent of this
state's 23 million-or-so adults, one might wonder at all of the front-page,
prime-time talk about health Nazis and personal freedom that has
accompanied the ban on smoking in bars.

That is, until one looks at the history of AB13.

How the hell did it ever become law?

Stephanie Salter is an Examiner columnist.