Editorial: Smoke-filled bars are hazardous

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    ( Oct. 12, 2009 ) Last summer Moscow became the first city in Idaho to extend the state's indoor smoking ban to bars. Some bar owners tell the Moscow-Pullman Daily News it has hurt the bottom line. In a tough economy, it's difficult not to sympathize with a business that has seen fewer customers come through the doors.

Harder still is not empathizing with the employees' plight. Nobody forces a customer to sit in one of these places. Those who do are free to take the risk.

But for someone who works there, spending hours and weeks in a room filled with secondhand tobacco smoke isn't merely unhealthy. It's flirting with danger.

Smokefree Idaho commissioned a study of bars and restaurants in the Treasure Valley. Included were 14 bars where smoking was permitted.

Conducted by staffers from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute of Buffalo, N.Y., the review analyzed air samples and found the following:

-- Air quality in smoke-filled bars wasn't merely unhealthy but deemed to be hazardous.

-- The level of pollution in bars where smoking was allowed was 15 times higher than in smoke-free businesses and 36 times worse than Boise's outdoor air quality.

-- Anybody spending time in a smoke-filled bar was exposed to air pollution "4.2 times higher than safe annual levels established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

Replicated hundreds of times, this kind of study confirms a harsh set of facts: Secondhand smoke contains at least 250 chemicals that are either toxic or carcinogenic. Even short-term exposure can trigger respiratory and circulatory ailments.

Long-term, secondhand smoke is tied to 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year among people who don't smoke. Secondhand smoke is blamed for 35,000 deaths from coronary heart disease, again among people who don't smoke.

When bans are imposed, worker health improves. When New York stopped indoor smoking, hospitals reported a 19 percent drop in heart attacks.

Although Idaho passed an indoor air quality act earlier in this decade, sponsors opted to exclude bars.

In a libertarian-leaning state, exempting businesses where children are excluded seemed like a reasonable trade-off. But there is no laissez faire for restaurants and bars. They're subjected to health inspections and regulations to ensure customers and workers a modicum of safety.

For 24 states, including Washington and the tobacco-growing state of North Carolina, extending smoking bans to bars and taverns is just one more way of protecting the public health. So far, none has seen the new policy undermine bar and restaurant traffic. In fact, New York offered a waiver to any bar that could demonstrate no smoking meant less trade.

Now Smokefree Idaho is pushing to extend the smoking bans to bars in 10 to 12 Idaho cities. All of which should tell Moscow's bar owners one thing: Their community may have been the first in Idaho to protect the health of bar and tavern workers. But it won't be last.

© The Lewiston Morning Tribune; Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, 2009.