Bonnie Clark knows she is addicted to cigarettes, and she’s trying to quit. But she’s having a tough time giving them up.
“If the city banned smoking, it would help me, because I want to quit,” said Clark, 31. “Yes, it is more government control, but the government controls other things that can be harmful. I don’t have a problem with it, but that is just my perspective. Other people might not like it, but it would help me.”
If the Pasadena City Council has its way, Clark may soon get the help she needs to quit.
In the next few weeks, council members are expected to join Glendale and Burbank by strengthening the city’s anti-smoking laws to protect tenants in apartments and condos from exposure to secondhand smoke.
The council’s Public Safety Committee is set to review a study to expand the city’s smoking ordinance to include multiunit dwellings and units that share common walls. The committee canceled its Jan. 3 meeting and has yet to reschedule, according to Councilwoman Jacque Robinson, who said the issue would come up soon.
“I don’t know what staff will recommend,” Robinson told the Weekly, “but based on the comments we get from people coming to the meetings, in general, I think people would like to see a stronger ordinance in Pasadena that applies to multifamily dwellings.”
Pasadena’s current ordinance prohibits smoking in parks, restaurants and within 20 feet of local businesses. Many residents, however, want the law to go further, according to city Tobacco Control Program Coordinator Statice Wilmore.
“We have been receiving complaints from apartment and condo dwellers,” Wilmore said. “It is affecting their livability and it is a nuisance. People have complained about their apartments and condo being filled with smoke. They are not able to sleep or open doors and windows because of smokers in other units.”
Locally, 12.2 percent of Pasadenans still light up, Wilmore said, matching the state average of 12 percent, according to the California Department of Public Health’s California Tobacco Control Program.
California is the only state that recognizes second-hand smoke as a toxic air pollutant, placing it in the same category as arsenic and diesel exhaust. A 2007 report by the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment blames secondhand smoke for 4,000 lung cancer- and heart disease-related deaths each year in California.
“You can smoke in your apartment or condo, but smoke travels because you can’t stop it and then it becomes a public safety issue,” Robinson said. “You can smoke until your lungs turn black, but at the end of the day it affects other people. We’re all aware of the risks of secondhand smoke and how unhealthy it is. People don’t want to expose themselves to it.”
Soon after Pasadena passed its ordinance, Glendale and Santa Monica went a step further, prohibiting smoking 20 feet from all city property (except streets and sidewalks), city vehicles and public transportation vehicles, city public transit stations, places of employment, enclosed public places, non-enclosed public places, and common areas of multiunit rental housing.
Tenant support groups have complained that smoking should not be a cause for eviction. Wilmore told the Weekly that the city is not trying to invade people’s bedrooms, but instead is working to deal fairly with a public safety issue.
“It’s not about telling people what they can do in their home,” said Wilmore. “This is a public health issue. We know drifting smoke affects people’s health. We are looking into how we can deal with smoke drifting to other peoples units. We are not saying you can’t smoke. We are saying that if you are going to smoke, it’s a public health issue if it drifts into other people’s units.”
Pasadena has been working to provide more protection from smoking since 2007, when the Centers for Disease Control gave the city a grade of C for its efforts to keep citizens from secondhand smoke in parks, recreational spaces, entryways and service lines.
“I don’t smoke in the parks,” Clark said. “If they increase the ban, I will follow it. I don’t do illegal things.”
Expanding the punitive tax base. That's what this is all about. So what happens when somebody is cooking a particularly noxious brew of food, or otherwise burning some incense? Wanna really fu*ck over those neighbors you don't care for? Simply call up the tobacco-police and accuse them of criminal cigarette consumption.
Then, Pasadena's police can send out the SWAT team in their new, $120,000 troop carrier and splatter those nasty tube-tokers all over the apartment!
HOWEVER, tobacco smoking IS NOT medical marijuana smoking. Furthermore, not a single case of lung cancer has EVER been medically attributed to Marijuana. So, what happens when the cops discover that they just broke into some minority resident's home and cast out all the underwear drawers looking for that illicit packs of cigarettes, only to discover that it was grandma toking her medical marijuana that caused this home invasion?
To outlaw the practice of an otherwise legal addiction merely because some apartment dwellers don't appreciate the tobacco habits of their neighbors is just another anonymous nanny-state assault on liberty. If that tight-assed neighbor is really being assauted by sidestream smoke, then they can take it to court and sue! Then, after reviewing any relevant evidence, by issuing a "health-concerns" court order, only the appropriately offending apartment dweller (as opposed to the entire population of Apartment/Condo dwellers) may be required to alter their home-smoking habits.
But by casting such tyranny into a "one-size-fits-all" law? It just gives the jackboots of our expanding California police state yet another reason to kick anybody's door down, AND THEN -- though they find no cigarettes -- charge their home-invasion victims for whatever discovered conduct they do decide to represent as "illegal."
Health Issues,
For the Children,
Save the Whales,
Hug a Tree ... there is ALWAYS