Smoking ban gets panel’s approval

02/10/2005

BY RACHEL E. STASSEN-BERGER

Pioneer Press

Restaurant diners would have to say goodbye to their after-dinner smokes and bar drinkers would have to snuff out their butts under a statewide smoking ban approved by a Senate panel Tuesday.

The measure, which comes in the wake of local bans passed recently across the state, still has quite a distance to travel before it becomes law. A smoking ban wending its way through the Minnesota House would exempt bars and allow restaurants to create separate, ventilated smoking rooms.

Still, backers were hopeful a statewide smoking ban would become law this year.

“We are walking up this hill, and every day we gain a little ground,” said Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, co-sponsor of the Senate’s smoking ban. “There is still a lot more of the session to go.”

If the measure were before the Democrat-controlled Senate today, Dibble said, it would have “an even chance.”

In the Republican-controlled House, however, Speaker Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon, said the ban’s chances were “not good.”

A watered-down version of the measure did move through the House Health Policy and Finance Committee last month but didn’t get the panel’s recommendation. The House Commerce Committee will next hear the measure — and Sviggum said it will get a tough reception there as well.

Tuesday’s Senate hearing showed the emotions and fight driving the ban’s proponents and opponents. The Health and Family Security Committee heard the full range of reactions during more than two hours of testimony.

Lawmakers heard about studies that “proved” the harm of secondhand smoke and how restaurants thrive under smoking bans.

But they also heard that those studies were based on “bad science” and how businesses would crumble if a ban were enacted.

Brian Rank, a medical oncologist with HealthPartners, asked lawmakers to think of his dying patients.

“I wish you could see the world through my eyes each and every day I tell a patient he or she has lung cancer. … You must take action,” Rank said.

But another doctor begged them to consider a different perspective. Citing the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, John Locke and the American Revolution, Minneapolis radiologist Lee Kurisko said a ban would impinge on fundamental freedoms.

“Freedom is the ability to make our own choices,” Kurisko said. Business owners also offered differing perspectives.

“It has been wonderful not having to work with secondhand smoke,” said Romelle Jones, owner of the Arts Café in Moose Lake, which, like a number of local governments in Minnesota, has recently enacted smoking restrictions.

She said her business has flourished since the ban.

But Sue Jeffers, owner of Minneapolis’ Stub and Herb’s, said a restaurant smoking ban would turn customers away.

“Prohibition did not work the first time and it will not work this time,” Jeffers said.

Colin Minehart, of the Minnesota Licensed Beverage Association and a restaurant owner, offered senators a novel proposal.

“Consider giving bar owners video lottery in exchange for your desire to ban smoking,” said Minehart of Alden in southern Minnesota.

At least that, he said, would allow bars to make up for lost revenue.