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No-smoking Crackdown No Risk To Bars In Athens

Nevertheless, the state of Ohio is taking a new approach toward punishing establishments that allow smoking cigarettes by threatening to deny renewal of liquor licenses based on unpaid smoking cigarettes-ban fines.

Earlier this month, a liquor-license renewal was denied for a Cincinnati-area bar called Peg's Pub, which owed approximately $55,900 in fines for 18 violations plus interest.

In Athens, no bar has come close to that number of fines. Figures provided by Athens City-County Health Department Director Chuck Hammer show that the number of smoking cigarettes-ban incidents have declined since the ban went into effect.

In 2007, after voters approved the smoking cigarettes ban in May, 39 complaints were issued between that time and December, Hammer said. Nine warning letters were sent out, and no fines were issued.

In the first full year of the ban, 2008, the department received 41 complaints, sent out 12 warning letters and issued six fines. Those numbers dropped to 29 complaints in 2009, eight warning letters and four fines. And then in 2010, it dropped again to 25 complaints and four warning letters, but six fines.

So far, in 2011, the department has fielded 20 complaints, sent five warning letters and has not issued any fines.

Ohio Liquor Control spokesperson Matt Mullins has said that his agency is working closely with the Ohio Health Department and the Ohio Attorney General's office to deny liquor-permit renewals to any businesses with repeated violations and unpaid fines.

Hammer said that some unpaid fines do remain in Athens County, but wouldn't say which businesses are involved.

"I do have a couple places that have been found in violation, and they've been given a warning letter. And then they've been found in violation again and given a fine. And they haven't paid the fine," he said. "We don't levy fines through here. That's all done through the Ohio Department of Health. And if the fines aren't paid, I think it's turned over to the Ohio attorney general for collection."

Hammer said that the most serious repercussions from the law arise from the fines.

"I guess you can smoke cigarettes all you want in these places if you can afford it," he said. "I've had people tell me that they don't think that it's right for me to be coming in there. And I tell them, 'I don't really care if you smoke cigarettes or not. You can smoke cigarettes as much as you can afford.' Because it does carry a fine."

He said he believes that if fines are paid, then the state can't take punitive action such as denying a liquor-license renewal.

"We've had a lot of really good cooperation," he said. "I think people understand around here the value of the law and the workings of it."

During the battle over Ohio's two-year budget, which went into effect July 1, at one point the funds for enforcing the smoking cigarettes ban were stripped away, but Hammer said that those funds eventually got restored.

He said that the smoke-free workplace law will continue to be enforced locally. The Athens City-County Departments gets about $120 per investigation from the state, he said.

"What that consists of is, whenever a complaint is called in to the state toll-free number, they accept that and forward it down to us," he said. "And we look at that complaint and do an investigation within a certain timeframe to be compensated for that."

After a first complaint, if a violation is found, he said, the business receives a letter of warning. Subsequent violations within two years of that letter of warning can escalate to successively higher fines.

"We've had a few of those, but generally speaking, after a warning or a couple of findings the businesses are compliant with the regulations," he said.

Hammer said it's not uncommon to get complaints and then no violations are found.

Often these complaints are based on a misunderstanding of the law, he said, such as patrons complaining about smokers standing outside of a business or in an open-air patio.

"That may not be a violation of the law depending on the circumstance," he said. "We look at it and we carefully follow the requirements of the law. Sometimes we find the complaint doesn't refer to an actual violation. People may be smoking cigarettes but it might not be in a restricted area."

Fines start at $100 and go up from there, getting larger with subsequent violations, he said.

Hammer said that when he does an investigation, he personally has to find a violation of the law.

"That could be lack of posting of a sign, or smoking cigarettes in a prohibited area, but the investigator has to find the violation," he said. "So a lot of times people might say they were smoking cigarettes someplace but we don't find an ashtray or any evidence that there was a smoking cigarettes violation. So we just dismiss it then."

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Bar Owners Urge Alexandria Council Not To Enact Smoking Ban

The ordinance would expand the city's smoking cigarettes ban in restaurants and most workplaces in the city to include bars and gaming establishments such as bingo halls. In addition, all hotels would be required to be smoke-free, while smoking cigarettes would be banned at nursing homes and within 50 feet of all public buildings and facilities.

Bar owners who attended the meeting said they should have the right to choose whether to allow employees and patrons to smoke, and if they're forced to eliminate smoking cigarettes, it will hurt their profit margins.

"Do smokers not have rights, or is it just people who don't smoke?" asked Larry Dickerson, owner of the Chalet Lounge on North Bolton Avenue.

"It is gonna hurt my business, there's no doubt about it," said Clyde "C.B." Bennett, who owns Sharkey's Sports Bar & Grill on Coliseum Boulevard.

Bob Mahfouz, owner of the Bayview Yacht Club on Windsor Place, said there's no question that if patrons are banned from smoking cigarettes in Alexandria bars they will just take their business elsewhere. That's why he said he would like to see the City Council and Rapides Parish Police Jury get together to form a parishwide smoking cigarettes ban.

"This is business we're talking about, not whether smoking cigarettes is good or bad," Mahfouz said.

Officials from the Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco-Free Living attended Thursday's meeting to make a pitch about the health hazards of second-hand smoke cigarettes in bars to both employees and patrons.

"It's quite clear this is an issue that a lot of people care about," said Carrie Broussard, policy and advocacy manager for the Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco-Free Living.

The organization is part of a statewide tobacco control program funded by a state excise tax on tobacco passed in 2002. Its goals are:

~ To eliminate exposure to secondhand smoke.
~ To prevent initiation of tobacco use among youth.
~ To promote tobacco cessation among youth and adults.
~ To identify and eliminate tobacco-related disparities.
~ To facilitate effective coordination of all tobacco control and prevention initiatives throughout the state of Louisiana.

Dr. David Holcombe, regional administrator and medical director for Region VI of the state Office of Public Health, said he was prohibited from commenting specifically about the proposed ordinance. However, he said, unequivocally, that a ban on smoking cigarettes is needed.

"Smoking kills you," he said. "Not only does it kill you, it kills the people around you. ... It isn't just a personal choice."

But bar owners argued that it's precisely about that. They say employees aren't forced to work at bars, and patrons don't have to show up with their business.

Pat Burns, who has worked for 22 years at the Sportsman Lounge on MacArthur Drive, said nobody is forcing her to work at the bar. Nor is anyone forcing customers to come to drink and socialize.

"No one has ever grabbed somebody off MacArthur Drive and dragged them into Sportsman Lounge and forced them to work, as far as I know," she said.

"I've never smoked a day in my life, but when I got into the club business I knew what to expect," said Fred Thompson, owner of Club 318 on Lee Street.

Charlie Anderson, commander of the VFW Post 8852 on Lower Third Street, said bar employees know they will have to deal with smoking cigarettes just like military members, police officers and firefighters know they will face hazards in the line of their duty.

"If you decide to work in a bar, you accept certain kinds of health risks," he said.

Ultimately, the choice whether to ban smoking cigarettes in bars belongs in the hands of the seven members of the Alexandria City Council. The ordinance will be introduced at the council meeting on July 26, City Attorney Chuck Johnson said. It will be voted on for final adoption on Aug. 9.

Silver was the only council member to speak at Thursday's meeting, while members Jim Villard and Mitzi Gibson also were in attendance. Bennett said it was "a slap in the face" that the other council members didn't attend to hear what the bar owners had to say.

The fact it's come down to the City Council telling bar owners how to run their businesses was another point of contention on Thursday.

"I don't like the government coming in and telling me what to do," said Ken Fuller, owner of West End Lounge on Rapides Avenue.

"I don't like to be dictated to," Mahfouz said.

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Cigarettes, Liquor, Even Soda

In 2005, then-Gov. Tim Pawlenty had a revenue problem, created largely by his pledge against any additional tax increases. State government was in shutdown (though less fully and seriously than now).

Taxes, according to the new Republican orthodoxy, were an unacceptable means of supporting the functions of government. So a "health impact fee" on tobacco products was proposed to avoid the tax tag.

The health impact fee on a pack of cheap cigarettes was and remains 75 cents. It passed and established a Republican precedent of such fees as a response to budget shutdowns.

These fees are recurring money and do not rely on phony shifts of costs to school districts, municipalities, or the elderly and disabled.

While poor people may smoke, drink and engage in other unhealthy behavior more than the rich (including food choices leading to obesity), causing such fees to be regressive, these decisions are voluntary and consistent with a Republican free-to-choose ideology.

In the current impasse, resulting largely from the same rigid antitax ideology, we should consider broadening the Pawlenty precedent of health impact fees to alcohol and soda drinks. Apart from a consensus on the health risks of tobacco, the evidence in favor of the health benefits of reduced alcohol consumption, especially of distilled spirits, needs no repetition.

As the Mondale-Carlson Task Force noted in its recommendations last week, the fee on distilled spirits has not been raised since 1987. In deference to brewing and wine drinking (one for the ballpark, the other for the opera), beer and wine might be exempted.

Finally, Minnesota could again establish itself as a national trendsetter with the first substantial soft-drink health impact fee in the nation. Virtually every study of the impact of soft drinks on childhood and adolescent obesity has found a clear link. Any measure that would induce substitution of fruit juices or milk is a nutritional step in the right direction.

Based on Minnesota Department of Revenue estimates from 2009-10, an increase in the Pawlenty health impact fee on cheap cigarette online of another 75 cents, and in tobacco excise taxes from the current 48 cents to a dollar, would generate $393 million in recurring revenues over the two-year budget cycle, after adjusting for a reduction in consumption due to the higher prices (what economists call the price elasticity response).

An increase in the tax rate on distilled spirits from $1.33 per liter to $2 (exempting beer and wine) would generate another $101 million over the biennium. Finally, adding a health impact fee of 5 percent on a one-dollar, 12-ounce can of soda would generate $36 million in new revenues to state coffers.

These additions add up to $530 million, or more than half a billion dollars in recurring revenues, not simply end-of-session accounting gimmicks. Each of them discourages behaviors that add to the costs of health and human services, due to the serious and expensive private and public consequences of smoking cigarettes, alcohol abuse and obesity.

If, in their myopic conception of revenue generation, those opposed to these health impact fees prefer to support continued lung and heart disease, traffic fatalities, and cirrhosis, type-2 diabetes and childhood obesity, let this be their choice.

But the time for constructive efforts to generate revenues is now, and health impact fees are the answer.

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Why A Cigarettes Tax To Help End Shutdown Is Smart

Pundits like to suggest that state government is in crisis because of today's budget deadlock. But in truth the challenges facing Minnesota are no different than the ones faced in Washington or in most state capitals.

Our state and our country are changing. People are getting older while we are producing fewer workers, and our gains in productivity aren't large enough to fill the gap between growth in the users of government services and the relatively flat growth of tax revenue.

As the CEO of an organization that provides valuable services to disadvantaged adults, and as a former regional administrator for the Metropolitan Council, I have a real appreciation for the arguments made on both sides of the political debate.

I firmly believe that government can and should live within its means. Families do, businesses do, and we all struggle to pay higher taxes every year. However, we also cannot ignore the important role government plays in service delivery.

The debate over the size of the state budget is masking a different debate. Regardless of whether your number is $34 billion or $36 billion, how should we tax Minnesotans?

Just as lawmakers shouldn't assume that the same level and types of services are needed every year, they should also evaluate the tax policies used to create the revenue needed to run government.

The smartest tax choice that legislators could make in special session is to raise the price of tobacco. The Minnesota Department of Revenue recently released numbers that show a $1.50 per pack tobacco price increase would raise nearly $400 million during the next two years alone.

That's a number policymakers can trust and an amount that could go a long way toward bridging the gap that remains between the governor and the Legislature.

To his credit, the governor included a tobacco tax increase in a recent offer. Legislative leaders dismissed it out of hand as just another tax increase. But a tobacco price increase would do more than help get us through this budget debate.

It would tackle one of the state's most preventable and costly long-term financial challenges: tobacco use and its harm on Minnesotans. Smoking kills more than 5,100 Minnesotans a year and accounts for almost $3 billion a year in excess health care costs.

Those costs are part of the reason that health care inflation is a major challenge for the state budget -- we spend too much money treating the illnesses caused by tobacco instead of following proven ways of keeping people from smoking cigarettes.

Fortunately, raising the price of tobacco is one of the best ways to keep youth from starting to smoke. In addition, a $1.50 per pack increase is expected to lead 28,100 current adult smokers to quit.

An increase in the tobacco tax should not be looked upon as just another way to raise new revenue. Proceeds from a tobacco tax increase could be used to offset other taxes that provide disincentives to economic growth (such as the corporate franchise tax) or that stress lower-income households (such as the property tax or some of Minnesota's growing collection of fees).

In fact, lower-income households, which are disproportionately targeted by tobacco company marketing, could get a win-win with this approach -- offsetting another regressive tax while providing an effective incentive to stop smoking cigarettes.

With a strong majority of Minnesotans supporting a tobacco price increase -- nearly three out of five, according to one recent poll -- policymakers on both sides of the aisle can feel confident that a tobacco price increase is a big step in the right direction.

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Philip Morris Sues 34 NYC Stores Over Fake Marlboros

Philip Morris USA said Wednesday it is suing 34 New York City retailers for allegedly hawking fake Marlboro cigarettes, a major source of lost revenue for the company.

The largest US cigarette manufacturer by revenue has waged a long-running campaign against sellers of the allegedly counterfeit cigarettes online from California and Florida to websites based in China. The two lawsuits brought Wednesday bring the total number of New York retailers sued by Philip Morris USA to 212.

The tobacco giant said there could be more than three million packs of counterfeit Marlboro buy cigarettes available in the New York City area each year. The city has the highest cigarette-tax rate in the country, which makes trading in illicit cheap cigarettes very profitable.

Tobacco companies have said the counterfeiting of cigarettes, often connected with organized crime syndicates, is so widespread around the world that it costs the industry billions of dollars in lost sales each year.

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Big Cigarettes Promotes Kid-Friendly Cigarettes Products

At the end of May, as the Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee (JFC) worked day after day and late into the night voting on changes and amendments to the state budget bill, Joint Finance Co-Chair Alberta Darling (R-River Falls) quietly slipped a small provision into the massive budget bill that has received little attention.

Her motion would change the way moist snuff and other smokeless cheap cigarettes products are taxed from a valuation based on volume to one based on weight. The measure not only provides a big tax break for companies like Altria/Phillip Morris USA and R.J. Reynolds cigarettes, it aids Big cigarettes in their latest outreach effort to kids.

Why would Darling and her co-conspiritor Senator Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) -- who both face recall campaigns this summer -- take such a gamble? The answer is unclear, but in November 2010, the River Hills Republican a $1,000 contribution from Altria Group/Phillip Morris PAC. Olsen received his own $1,000 contribution from Altria Group/Phillip Morris PAC a month earlier.
Candy or Winterchill Snus?

Moist snuff, also known as snus (sounds like "snoose"), comes in small pouches that are wedged in the upper lip or between the cheek and gums. Because of its low salt content, snus doesn't create the need to spit saliva out of one's mouth, so it would be nearly impossible to tell if a high schooler were chewing snus or Bazooka Joe bubble gum. In fact, many snus flavors, such as "original" "frost" and "spice," are designed to recall chewing gum flavors, and package instructions: "pop, tingle and enjoy," mimic PR campaigns for candy and soda.

Marlboro and Camel snus containers come in different fruit flavors and bright candy-colored packaging, that might be tempting to youth drawn in by the product's artificially low prices. Hooking kids on groovy, "refreshing" nicotine products at a young age is one of Big cigarettes's key strategies for cultivating a dedicated user base.

According to Maureen Busalacchi, Executive Director of Health First Wisconsin, the discount cigarettes industry has "clearly manipulated snus products to make them more appealing to kids," by using sweet cherry and grape flavors that "don't necessarily appeal to your average, 30-year-old chew user." Busalacchi pointed out that, just like cigarettes, snus "contains carcinogens, and causes cancer."

Advertising for snus, often displayed in trendy display cases near the candy section of most convenience stores, also focuses on the supposed health advantages of switching to a smoke-free cheap cigarettes product. While health experts have suggested that using smokeless discount cigarettes is perhaps a better alternative to cigarettes, they are quick to caution that these products cause serious health problems like oral cancer, pancreatic cancer and gum disease.

The new system would have given buy cigarettes giants like Altria Group/Phillip Morris USA a competitive edge over smaller cigarettes online companies, as they possess better technology to manipulate their products' weight, thus minimizing the applicable tax and making Snus and Skoal Pouches more affordable and appealing. According to a 2009 survey by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, smokeless cheap cigarettes use among middle and high school kids has trended mostly upward in recent years, despite an all-time low teen smoking cigarettes rate.

Altria Group has aggressively pursued the implementation of a weight-based tax in various states. Under the new system, cheaper cigarettes brands would see prices for their products skyrocket, and a weight-based tax would not be subject to the same annual, inflation-adjusted price increases as a percentage-of-price tax. Because some snuff products can weigh as little as one-eighth of an ounce, a weight-based tax sharply reduces future state revenues. In 2009, the New York City Council banned all flavored cigarettes products, a move meant to protect the city's youth from kid-friendly manufacturing and marketing. The European Union has also banned the products.

More than a dozen public health groups, including the American Cancer Society, Health First Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Medical Society lobbied Governor Scott Walker to the veto the change, citing the obvious risks the Starburst-colored snus products pose to children.

Walker did so on June 26, 2011. Apparently, Governor Walker doesn't have the same craving to get kids hooked on cigarettes that presently afflicts at least two of his Republican colleagues. According to Followthemoney.org, he's received only $50 in campaign contributions from cigarettes companies and in 1996 he spearheaded a campaign to allow local governments to impose strict guidelines limiting teen access to cigarettes, such as eliminating the use of cigarette vending machines. And despite his open criticism of the statewide smoking cigarettes ban, Governor Walker announced Thursday that after hearing from people across Wisconsin, he will not pursue a repeal of the ban.

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