July/August 2007

Up in Smoke

Virginia's propsed ban on lighting up in public got snuffed out-but plenty of people on both sides of the issue are still burned up about it.

By Patrick Evans-Hylton

In the beginning, three British ships sailed up the James River and anchored at a location near present-day Williamsburg in 1607. The English had a difficult time—hostile natives, improper planting methods, poor sanitation and rampant disease took their toll, and many settlers died off. It seemed that the experiment by the Virginia Company would fail.

Enter John Rolfe, entrepreneur, with a notion to have the new land compete with Spain—which had the European market cornered—in the tobacco trade. With seeds of the smooth-smoking Nicotiana tabacum plant in hand, he deposited them in the soil in 1609 and found the results to be good.

By 1612, the Virginia colony had become a profitable venture. In 1616, 2,500 pounds of tobacco were produced. By 1619, tobacco led the importation of the colony's first black slaves, which, by the next year, were harvesting 119,000 pounds of the plant.

Tobacco remains a big element of the Virginia economy, not only as part of the manufacturing process, but also in use by consumers. According to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, almost $180 million was collection from Virginia's excise tax. In the same period, tobacco product sales tax collection was more than $105 million.

Even so, there is a momentum to snuff out cigarettes in public places, primarily restaurants, in the state. For the past three years, the General Assembly has considered such legislation. In this year's session, the proposal got the closest it ever has to being passed.

HEALTH CHECK UP

Many people, even smokers themselves, agree that tobacco products threaten the lives of their users. The sticky part comes with talking about secondhand smoke, or ETS (environmental tobacco smoke).

"If it's bad for the health—and that's no secret; it's [printed] on the pack of cigarettes—it's their choice," says Ronnie Boone, Ocean View developer and owner of Greenies, a Norfolk restaurant that allows smoking. "If that's what they enjoy, then so be it."

The United States Department of Health and Human Services says cigarette smoke contains more than 4,000 chemical compounds, many of which are the same as those inhaled smokers.

The National Toxicology Program estimates that at least 250 chemicals in secondhand smoke are known to be toxic or carcinogenic, and secondhand smoke has been designated as a known human carcinogen, or cancer-causing agent, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"We [smokers] are not harming anybody," says Karyn Kimberling, president of the Virginia Smokers Alliance, an Arlington-based lobbying group. "No one is going to get cancer if they sit next to us in a restaurant or at a desk. The American Cancer Society, they heart association, the lung association—what I call the usual suspects in all this anti-tobacco nonsense-are funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, or one of the other four largest pharmaceutical associations.

"Why? Simple—they are in it to make money. They are working on a smoking vaccine. They are working on a pill for obesity and a pill for alcoholism. [For smoking], you've already got a pill, the nasal spray, the gum, the [Commit] Lozenge, a hand cream the patch-all these products. It's multi-billion-dollar business, and they want it."

For the rest of this story, including more viewpoints on the smoking ban, see the July/August issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.