An outstanding human being and fellow political reporter John Micek of the Allentown Morning Call conducted a Q&A with Amy Christie, executive director of the Pennsylvania Tavern Association. The PA Tavern Association vigorously fought against the recently passed smoking ban for fear that mom-and-pop drinking establishments would lose business if their clientele were not permitted to light up. Here’s two questions I found interesting:
Q: The next big battle will likely be an attempt to include all bars and nightclubs in the ban. Given the glacial pace of how things move in the General Assembly, how realistic a goal is that? And how hard-fought a battle will it be?
A: ”No. 1, the smoking ban has been intense, and the Legislature has been dealing with it for 11 months in conference committee and for two years before that. The bill that has been passed is a long time coming. I don’t think any anti-smoking organization will be successful in going back to the well immediately. No. 2, we will fight it every step of the way.”
Q: Research in Massachusetts showed that sales and employment at restaurants and bars grew slightly in the first six months of a statewide smoking ban. Doesn’t that help to undercut arguments that this will hurt the economy here?
A: ”You can make any study say anything you want it to say. These studies don’t focus on only licensed establishments, they focus on the entire hospitality industry.” Referring to a May 2004 study of only small, licensed establishments in New York City: ”[Those businesses lost] 2,000 jobs in less than one year [after the smoking ban took effect]. There were $28.1 million in wages and salary payments lost and $37 million on gross state product lost.”
This line of thinking is part of the minority in Pennsylvania. Not only do polls show a majority of Pennsylvanians want a smoking ban in public indoor places, they were so outraged by the state Senate’s rejection last week of a proposed smoking prohibition it forced the Senate to go back, reverse course, and approve the same legislation. And if a majority of Pennsylvanians support smoking bans, wouldn’t that bode well for restaurants and taverns and bars which decide to eliminate smoking?
Why do some bars reject this wave of anti-smoking sentiment? The answer is, of course, that smoking is part of the “drinking” culture, and proprietors of drinking establishments fear a loss of revenue should they go nicotine free. But the study Christie cites in Micek’s interview is four years old, and just last year my fiancee and I visited NYC and could hardly find a seat in some of the bars we visited. Ditto that in my hometown of Cincinnati, which has a ban; Philadelphia, too, and while we visited Ireland, where supposedly a pub-a-day close down because of their national smoking ban, every pub we visited from small towns to Belfast were jammed with locals and tourists.
This debate is not so much about revenue, and to criticize a smoking prohibition as detrimental to the bottomline misses the argument entirely. This isn’t about money. It’s about public health. It’s about the waitress and the bus boy and the bartenders who don’t smoke but are exposed to dangerous second-hand smoke for hours at a time.
