Last in health

Even a limited ban on smoking in restaurants and hotels proves too much for tobacco-friendly Tar Heel legislators

They didn't do it in a smoke-filled room, no sir. North Carolina's legislators are too smart for that these days, too careful of their own hearts and lungs. Smoking is banned in the Legislative Building.

But that's where, last week, members of the state House, 61 to 55, defeated a statewide ban on smoking in restaurants and hotels.

They talked for two hours about public health and property rights, but in the end they voted as the representatives of the First in Tobacco state that they are. They voted as their predecessors have done, and they voted as their successors might well do, until the day North Carolina stands as the last-gasp smoke-friendly government on Planet Earth.

Got a match?

But increasingly there are few matches for the anti-health stance Tar Heel legislators take. Around the country and around the world smoking is under fire. It causes cancer, y'all, and heart disease and more -- and our state ranks high on all counts. It hurts the health of those who breathe in the smoke, not just the smokers.

We know that now, or we should. They certainly know it in 19 other states, where smoking even in bars is banned, or is about to be. Those states include such inconsequential places as California, New York, Arizona and Illinois (which acted just this month). They also know it in entire countries -- England (starting July 1), Ireland (yes, smoking is banned even in Irish pubs), New Zealand, Norway and many more.

Europeans and others who used to smoke like chimneys --and individually still may -- now accept that secondhand smoke is a danger to others no longer to be tolerated at indoor public settings.

And they don't waste a lot of breath on the "property rights" argument. Public accommodations have long been regulated for reasons of public health. It's no big step from barring bacteria-contaminated burgers to banning carcinogen-contaminated smoke.

If this were about rights, what about the right of workers to practice their trades in air not made unhealthy by smokers' actions? Or the right of municipalities to limit smoking locally, as hundreds in the United States have done, but as state law here has prohibited?

And, after last week, still prohibits.