Washington’s indoor smoke ban got its start in Pierce County, whose gutsy Board of Health forced the issue upon the state in 2003 by passing a push-the-envelope local ban.
Now the board ought to put an apartment smoke ban on the state agenda, as a citizens group is urging. It’s a seemingly radical idea, but the case for banning smoking in multi-unit dwellings sounds increasingly compelling. That case ought to be argued in Olympia.
PUSH – People United for Smoke-free Housing – wants the board to endorse such a ban to give the proposal more credibility in the Legislature. That shouldn’t be a stretch for the people who oversee the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department; their interest is public health, presumably undiluted by concern for “smokers rights.”
The best argument against a ban is that it would extend state regulation too deeply into people’s lives. That libertarian logic works well for single-family homes; in apartments and condominiums, it is undermined by the fact that there are usually nonsmoking neighbors living under the same roof.
When neighbors share walls and ventilation systems, and tobacco smoke inevitably seeps through gaps, cracks, ducts, electrical and plumbing conduits, appeals to personal choice cut both ways.
Should apartment residents have the right to smoke in their own homes? How about the nonsmoking neighbors’ right not to inhale secondhand fumes in their own homes?
Would a ban penalize smokers with little income, who may have no housing options beyond the apartments they’re in? Perhaps – but how about the poor who don’t smoke, but can’t flee their fouled air because they have no other housing options?
Then there’s the secondhand fire hazard. Careless smoking is the leading cause of fire deaths in multi-unit homes. Nonsmokers can’t prevent their neighbors from smoking in bed, but they can die when it happens.
There may be “rights” on both sides of this divide. But only the nonsmokers have their health jeopardized against their will. Smokers can choose to smoke outside or to not smoke at all; their nonsmoking neighbors have no choice but to breathe the secondhand carcinogens.
It should count for something, too, that nonsmokers generally vastly outnumber smokers in most apartment buildings. There is something worse than a tyranny of the majority: a tyranny of the minority.
Washingtonians may turn out to be simply too uncomfortable about extending their indoor smoke ban into private apartments and condominiums. But given the stakes involved – death and illness from secondhand smoke – the arguments ought to be heard.
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