You can embrace it and be proudly smoke-free, or resent it – either way, on March 1, if you’re a Rhode Island employer, you’ll have to ban smoking, even in private offices and in bars.
State health officials would like you to embrace it, and they’re reaching out to employers to help them see why this is a good thing, and help them enforce the law.
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On Jan. 7, the Department of Health mailed out packages to more than 40,000 employers explaining the law and offering free no-smoking signs, advice and information about smoking-cessation programs. A new ad campaign is under way celebrating Rhode Island’s status as No. 7 in the nation to go smoke-free.
And last Tuesday Gov. Donald L. Carcieri hosted an event at the State House with her to further promote the law, with support from businesspeople.
“We’re looking forward to working with businesses to make this happen,” Dr. Patricia A. Nolan, director of the state Department of Health, said, “because we know it’s such a huge step forward. To eliminate smoking is the biggest thing we can do for health in the 21st century.”
“This is a very, very proud day,” Carcieri said. “This is about creating healthier, safer and cleaner environments for all our workers.”
With many workplaces already smoke-free as a result of older laws, it’s the hospitality industry that’s going to be most affected on March 1, and Nolan enlisted Robert Burke, owner of the Federal Reserve and Pot au Feu restaurants, to explain why businesses will benefit.
Burke, who hailed March 1 as “Kick the Butt” Day, said it was “only a matter of time” before hospitality workers forced to breathe secondhand smoke would’ve started suing for workers’ compensation benefits for the damage to their health.
Smoke-free establishments will also have lower health care costs, Burke said. Because one-quarter of restaurant fires are caused by improper disposal of cigarettes, he added, the number of fires will drop. And paint, draperies, upholstery and carpeting will last longer.
But the “biggest plus” will be for Rhode Island families, Burke said, many of whom had “felt effectively barred at the doors of many restaurants” because they didn’t want to expose their children to airborne carcinogens.
Another business-world supporter of the ban, Dorothy Mattiello, vice president for human resources at Hope Global Engineered Textile Solutions, in Cumberland, said her company had gone smoke-free five years ago at the urging of its non-smoking employees, and with the support programs Hope Global offered, one-third of the smokers had kicked the habit.
Dan Dwyer, executive director of Electronic Data Systems (EDS), in Cranston, offered his help to any business concerned about the transition. There’s always anxiety with change, he said, but it’s “calmed by information and support.”
Health advocates – including the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society – are all enthusiastically supporting the law. In its “State of Tobacco Control 2004” report this month, the Lung Association called the new law “one of the strongest smoke-free laws in the country.”
Also in the report, the group hailed last year’s 75-cent cigarette tax hike, which gives Rhode Island the highest tax in the nation, and it praised the state’s efforts to keep children and teens from buying cigarettes. On the latter two points, the group gave the state “A” ratings.
Rhode Island got an “F” from the American Lung Association, however, for its investment in tobacco prevention and control, because the state spends only about one-third of what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would recommend. Thus Rhode Island’s “strong laws” aren’t enforced as they should be, the group noted.
