Smoking: The Butt Stops Here

On a bright, brisk spring afternoon last week, Bill Clinton threw out the first ball at the Cleveland Indians' opening-day game. But his pitch, high and over the plate, was more than the usual springtime rite. The President helped kick off the baseball season in Jacobs Field, a sleek, brand-new, $169 million stadium, a large chunk of which was financed by a 4.5 cents-a-pack local tax on cigarettes. Yet no one, no matter where they are sitting, is permitted to smoke in the open-air stands.

For antismoking activists in the U.S., the game these days is hardball.

For years, smokers and nonsmokers have managed an uneasy truce: Live and let live (or let die). You stay in your section; I'll stay in mine (but don't blow in this direction). Yet that truce is crumbling like a Bosnian cease-fire. In the past few months, a rash of new restrictions, legislation and governmental tough talk has elevated the antismoking campaign to new heights. Before, it was a matter of health warnings, moral persuasion and segregation of the warring parties. Now smoking is in danger of being legislated virtually out of existence -- or at least shoved into the realm of behavior so socially reviled that it must be practiced only in private.

The scene outside a posh new smoke-free office building in West Los Angeles is typical. Smokers who want to light up have to go out back, near the delivery-truck entrance, and gather next to the Dumpster. Yet Susan Castor, a production assistant for a cable-TV company, has accepted her thrice-daily trips to the Dumpster with surprising equanimity. "I'd just as soon smoke out here and not have my smoke bother anyone," says Castor, who describes herself as a light smoker. "I think it should be that way."

These forlorn scenes may be just a transitional phase. "I foresee that one day America will be smoke-free," says Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. She adds, "But not in my lifetime. We have 40 million people who are addicted to smoking. We've got to help them get over their addiction, and that's going to take a while."

The process, however, is being pushed forward on a variety of fronts:

A House subcommittee headed by California Democrat Henry Waxman will vote next week on the Smoke-Free Environment Act, perhaps the most sweeping antismoking legislation Congress has ever seriously considered. If the bill becomes law, buildings entered by 10 or more people each day -- including bars, restaurants and almost every structure that isn't someone's home -- will have to become smoke-free zones or face fines of up to $5,000 a day. Another House subcommittee has proposed raising the cigarette tax a whopping $1.25 a pack, largely to help finance health-care reform. Congress last month passed, and President Clinton signed, a bill that outlaws smoking in all public and some private schools. And last Friday U.S. Department of Defense restrictions went into effect that ban smoking in all military work spaces, ranging from military bases to tanks on the battlefield.