On April 1, voters in Marshfield passed a referendum to ban smoking in the workplace, including bars and restaurants. In a huge turnout, more than half of the town’s registered voters also cast ballots for mayor, several aldermen and county supervisors, and a state Supreme Court justice. And they decided their central-Wisconsin city of 19,000 did not need a second firehouse.
But it was the smoking ban that drew the biggest vote and widest margin of victory. Of the 6,534 who cast ballots on the issue, 64 percent voted for the ban, and Marshfield joined 34 other Wisconsin communities – from Ashland, Appleton and Kaukauna, to Wausau, Wauwatosa and Shorewood – in going “smoke-free.”
“This support is not an inch deep. This is mile-wide, mile-high,” says Maureen Busalacchi, executive director of Smoke Free Wisconsin.
But in the state legislature and Milwaukee’s City Hall, elected officials continue to choke on similar proposals.
A statewide smoking ban once looked promising. In the 2004-05 state budget, Gov. Jim Doyle kowtowed to the tobacco industry by slashing prevention measures and eliminating the Tobacco Control Board. But then last year, Doyle took on Big Tobacco with a three-pronged plan to curtail public smoking and help smokers quit. In the latest budget, the governor mustered enough votes for a $1 increase on the cigarette tax, and he boosted funding for prevention programs to $15 million per year, returning to 2002-03 funding levels. That’s less than half the minimum level of $31.2 million recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
The third prong, a statewide ban to take effect in 2009, was contained in a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Steve Wieckert (R-Appleton) and Sen. Fred Risser (D-Madison) that passed Senate and Assembly committees. But it ran into the tobacco industry’s dynamic duo, Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker (D-Weston) and Sen. Roger Breske (D-Eland), the Democratic Caucus Chair and former president of the Tavern League. The pair put forward a revised plan that delayed the statewide ban until July 2011. Worse, it preempted local communities from passing their own bans for 3 1/2 years.
Stipulations by Decker (who accepted $12,350 in campaign contributions from tobacco and tavern lobbies between 2003-07, according to Wisconsin Democracy Campaign) and Breske (who received $29,957 – more than any other legislator) became deal breakers, and the proposed ban went nowhere. (Mercifully, Breske’s legislative career came to an end in May when Doyle appointed him commissioner of railroads.)
Meanwhile, in City Hall, a bid to ban smoking has dropped off the radar, including a measure introduced three years ago by Ald. Joe Davis that would have outlawed smoking in workplaces. Facing resistance from restaurant and bar owners who claimed a ban would hurt business, Davis added an amendment that would have delayed compliance and exempted businesses with air-filtration systems. But the effort still went up in smoke.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said he would pursue a regional ban to placate bar and restaurant owners who said customers would flee to the suburbs to avoid a city law. But after a year of inaction, he now says he’ll pursue a Milwaukee ban only if the state fails to do so by 2010.
Waiting for the state to act is weak-kneed political expediency. If the state’s largest city passed a smoking ban, how could the state not follow?
Our policy makers are woefully behind the curve. Currently, 33 states have full or partial statewide bans on smoking. And, according to an April poll by the Mellman Group for the anti-tobacco lobby, 69 percent of Wisconsin voters say they support a statewide ban, including in bars and restaurants. Moreover, nearly a third of those polled said they would patronize businesses more often if they were smoke-free, compared to 7 percent who said they would go out less often.
“This is a dam that’s about to break,” says Dr. Patrick Remington, co-chair of the state’s Tobacco Prevention and Control Advisory Board. “The public is so much in favor of clean indoor air that the politicians are going to be running fast to catch up.”
A ban on smoking can no longer be regarded as “a bold social experiment,” says Remington. The science is sound. The dangers of secondhand smoke – called “hogwash” by Breske – were dramatized in a 2006 report by the U.S. Surgeon General. It said the only way to protect nonsmokers was to eliminate smoking indoors. And in Massachusetts, a study released in May found that youths who live in towns with strict smoking bans were 40 percent less likely to become regular smokers than those in communities with no bans.
In Wisconsin, 7,300 people will die each year from diseases associated with smoking. The annual health costs will top $2 billion. At what point do we say enough is enough?
Across the country, an estimated 50 percent of all Americans are now protected by no-smoking laws. But in Wisconsin, a state with a long-but-fading history of progressive politics, those who don’t puff have become second-class citizens.
