Man Files Federal Lawsuit Against Illinois Smoking Ban

[kster]

Updated: Feb 8, 2008

By: Carly O'Keefe

DIX, Ill. - In filing a federal lawsuit against the Smoke Free Illinois Act, Vietnam veteran Frederick Price says he's not a big shot--just an average Joe trying to defend freedom as he's always done.

"I went over there to fight for your rights--as a non-smoker, and my rights as a smoker," said Price.

While Price can't afford a high-dollar attorney, he wanted to do what he could do. He wrote out a formal complaint by hand, alleging the Illinois Department of Public Health, Governor Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois Legislature and the Illinois Attorney General have discriminated against him as a smoker. He filed the lawsuit Monday at the Southern District Federal Court in Benton, Illinois.

"The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the very basis of the Constitution, and they're being denied. My rights are being denied," said Price.

Rest of story with video...

http://www.kfvs12.com/global/story.asp?s=7841348

[Blue-Jay]

1. .

:popcorn:




:smoke:

[americanstranger]

2. Good luck with that, Fred.

Gotta give him points for trying, I guess.

- as

[Kittycat]

3. We (IL) aren't saying he can't smoke.

We're saying he can't do it in public restaurants, places of business or other public buildings. His habit has health implications for others as well - so for everyone's health, we only ask that he do so in the privacy of his own home, vehicle - and in most communities - Outside. (Some communities have adopted barrier zones, where you can't smoke within so many feet of entrances of businesses/public buildings.

[americanstranger]

4. Yeah, he doesn't have a shot.

What do they say about someone who represents himself? ;)

- as

[Kittycat]

5. Oh I agree.

It's just such an annoyance hearing people complain about it. I'm one of those that has serious health impact, as a result of being exposed to it. It's not something I can plan for - short of avoiding places all together. For once in my life, I don't have to worry about where I sit, and hope that they have good ventilation. I can actually sit and breath through an entire meal without getting sick or congested, or having difficulty breathing.

[americanstranger]

9. I'm a smoker, and I have no problem with it myself.

I live in smoke-free New York. I got no problem going outside to smoke.

- as

[kster]

I think hes saying, why should all public places be non smoking,

that maybe the lawmakers can find a way to be fair and give us smokers a couple of public places where we can go hang out and smoke. :shrug:

[kster]

7. delete

[invader zim]

6. more power to ya Fred

good luck. keep up the good fight

[orleans]

8. well, i guess you can't say this guy didn't try. n/t

[shraby]

10. How can they ban a legal substance?

It's perfectly legal to smoke cigarettes. I quit some time ago, but this man has a legal right to smoke cigarettes if he wants.

[americanstranger]

11. They're not banning the substance.

Only limiting the locations in which it can be used. Big difference.

No state would ever ban tobacco outright. There's far too much tax revenue to be collected.

For the record: I believe that it should be the decision of each establishment whether or not they participate in the ban. And if they decide to remain a smoking establishment. Bar and restaurant owners know their own clientele better than anyone, and should be able to cater to that clientele.

- as

[kster]

12. Then they are shooting themselves in the foot

In IL we are seeing the actual tally come in now. Before we had estimations now we got actual stats. Revenue since the ban is down 28%. Business closures will reach 34% by next year. How much fine revenue has the govt got? 0.0 Tax increases are predicted due to the unbalanced budget next year. Our taxes are supposed to rise by the largest margine in any states history. Good job anti smokers you killed the economy.

[americanstranger]

13. New York has a weird 'no-look' policy.

A lot of bars ignore the ban outright. In the first year there were a lot of inspectors out fining club owners, but since then they'e kind of let everyone slide.

In effect, they're following my idea - they're letting each establishment decide. The law is on the books, but a lot of places just don't pay attention to it.

- as

[Historic NY]

15. Better not get caught, stiff fines..............

and it only takes a complaint by a patron. In my NY county they do go out and check.

[pleah]

14. You go Fred!

I wondered how long it would be before someone confronted these discriminatory laws.
Businesses should be able to choose if they want to ban smoking. If people don't want to be there that is their choice. In my view, it is a choice. (As long as it is legal to smoke)

[Justin54B20L]

16. How about this then?

Businesses should be able to choose if they want to clean food prepping utensils. If people don't want to be there that is their choice. In my view, it is a choice. (As long as it is legal to eat)

Fixed for better understanding. The problem is that business are historically known for paying little attention to concerns about public health except in cases where it hurts their bottom line. People in general usually become attached to certain business they like and usually stick with them because they build up a history with those businesses. This emotionally attaches people to the businesses they like and dissuades people from switching to new businesses due to familiarity and comfortability. Therefore the invisible hand of the market becomes a near-useless motivator for businesses with an established clientèle.

It is then left to the government to force businesses to make changes regarding public health. But even with this forcing, the government takes into consideration the economic impact of its proposed legislation as to ensure that the recommended actions do not severely affect the economy. With these kinds of legislation however, health impacts to consumers/patrons are not a primary concern the government takes into account. The government is more concerned about the impacts to worker health since workers are unable to leave the working environment in which they find themselves.


Look, section 5 of the Illinois Public Act 095-0017 known as the Smoke Free Illinois Act spells out clearly why the State believes it has regulatory authority and the purpose behind the law. It's hardly discriminatory because it is not about you, its about the workers.

Section 5. Findings. The General Assembly finds that
tobacco smoke is a harmful and dangerous carcinogen to human
beings and a hazard to public health. Secondhand tobacco smoke
causes at least 65,000 deaths each year from heart disease and
lung cancer according to the National Cancer Institute.
Secondhand tobacco smoke causes heart disease, stroke, cancer,
sudden infant death syndrome, low-birth-weight in infants,
asthma and exacerbation of asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia in
children and adults. Secondhand tobacco smoke is the third
leading cause of preventable death in the United States.
Illinois workers exposed to secondhand tobacco smoke are at
increased risk of premature death. An estimated 2,900 Illinois
citizens die each year from exposure to secondhand tobacco
smoke.
The General Assembly also finds that the United States
Surgeon General's 2006 report has determined that there is no
risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke; the scientific
evidence that secondhand smoke causes serious diseases,
including lung cancer, heart disease, and respiratory
illnesses such as bronchitis and asthma, is massive and
conclusive; separating smokers from nonsmokers, cleaning the
air, and ventilating buildings cannot eliminate secondhand
smoke exposure; smoke-free workplace policies are effective in
reducing secondhand smoke exposure; and smoke-free workplace
policies do not have an adverse economic impact on the
hospitality industry.
The General Assembly also finds that the Environmental
Protection Agency has determined that secondhand smoke cannot
be reduced to safe levels in businesses by high rates of
ventilation. Air cleaners, which are capable only of filtering
the particulate matter and odors in smoke, do not eliminate the
known toxins in secondhand smoke. The American Society of
Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)
bases its ventilation standards on totally smoke-free
environments because it cannot determine a safe level of
exposure to secondhand smoke, which contains cancer-causing
chemicals, and ASHRAE acknowledges that technology does not
exist that can remove chemicals that cause cancer from the air.
A June 30, 2005 ASHRAE position document on secondhand smoke
concludes that, at present, the only means of eliminating
health risks associated with indoor exposure is to eliminate
all smoking activity indoors.

[ruiner4u]

17. im with you man...

there is NO reason my children and I should have to breath in other people's smoke when I take them to the neighborhood pub. Having to smell other people's yuckie smoking habit is gross when im downing a 2$ pitcher of beer while my 8 year old plays the pinball machine till 2 o'clock AM.. His lungs deserve to be in a clean environment before he breathes into my Breathalyzer so I can drive home.

[kster]

19. Well that ain't right

I have to pay 4 dollars for a pitcher of beer. :7

[kster]

18. Then a bar that has no employees

run by a Wife and Husband, should be able to allow smoking in their bar, so long as its posted on the front door, that it is a smoking establishment.

[Justin54B20L]

21. Should? Perhaps, I can see that.

If a bar is owned by a partnership and run solely by the partners in question (i.e. no one on a payroll) then the claims of worker protection fall short. However this would have to be an exclusion listed in the exemption section of a smoking ban law. Currently no state with a smoking ban in place offer such a provision. The reason for this is simplicity. Establishments run solely by partnerships are few and far between.

I can see where it could be considered unduly burdensome on the state to segregate such establishments through enforcement. Such establishments would have to be inspected on a regular basis and their tax filings separated out and audited to ensure that no employees exist. This would not only be costly for the state to enforce but also place undue hardships on the owners themselves. Since audits would have to be regular I don't think you'd see many business jumping to be audited by the IRS or some equal state agency on a regular basis.

[kster]

23. This is my biggest fear for the employees that depend on these jobs

is that a proprietor will get the idea of putting vending type machines in the bar, that a customer can put three bucks in and get their own beer throughout the night, I wouldn't want to have all those waiter and waitress jobs eliminated like that.

The owners can run the place by themselves without the employees, all they would have to do is the mixed drinks.

[Mugu]

30. Smokers are better tippers.

So maybe you could have a bar where there are no employees but instead volunteers that are only compensated by tips from the customers.

Regards, Mugu

[kster]

31. Brilliant, between the volunteers and the beer vending machines

the bar owners could eliminate employees, and we could drink and smoke in peace. The bars will be like self serve gas stations. B-)

[kiva]

20. Should be up to a business owner.

Several restaurants banned smoking long before they had to; why? because they knew their customers, and thought it would help their business. By the same token, other businesses, especially bars, have a substantial number of smokers as customers and have discovered that banning smoking hurts their business. This is especially true for small, neighborhood bars that rely on a regular customer base.

I suggest that business who choose to allow smoking should be required to post signs on their doors to that effect, and let customers choose whether or not they want to patronize that establishment.

[spoony]

22. I had no idea the Vietnam War was about smoking, or any rights

real or imagined.

[dysfunctional press]

24. the hysteria about second-hand smoke is TOTAL HORSESHIT

http://www.davehitt.com/facts/epa.html

[kster]

25. They always forget this little study of Californians, 1960-98

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=1&author1=enstrom&searchid=1063712558723_4332&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=1,2,3,4,10

[Justin54B20L]

26. I hope you're not using this study as an arguement against smoke bans...

Because if you are, you are drawing the wrong conclusions from this study.

The study concludes that, within this cohort, the reported relative risk of coronary heart disease of 30% from secondhand smoke is not plausible. It doesn't preclude that there is no association, only that the percentage is much lower than believed. Furthermore, the study can not disprove the reported relative risk associated between secondhand smoke and lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Based on these findings, exposure to environmental tobacco smoke could not plausibly cause a 30% increase in risk of coronary heart disease in this cohort, although a 20% increase in risk of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease could not be ruled out.

Indeed this study concludes that there exists no causal relation between secondhand smoke and associated mortality. Looking at the data and statistical analysis on the available I would have come to conclude the same thing. This study however fails to mention several key factors which makes me believe that their conclusion is not as strong as they might think.

First of all, out of all the surviving contacts for the 1999 follow-up questionnaire, roughly only half of the matched respondents completed the questionnaire correctly or at all. Loss like this however is inevitable in this type of study and reduces the power and strength of the conclusion. Unfortunately this is mentioned only briefly and in the methods section and not in the discussion section where the reduction of strength due to these losses should be pointed out.

Also, the study denotes secondhand smoke to be purely "spousal-smoking" as one respondent to the article points out (Stephen J. Jay,
Professor of Medicine and Public Health Indiana University School of Medicine, 1050 Wishard Blvd. RG 4175, Indianapolis, IN. 46202).

The fatal flaws in the paper by Enstrom and Kabat (BMJ 2003;326:1057- 0) are evident in the title of the article and in the Objective statement.

The title claims the study is "a prospective study." It is not by any contemporary definition of the term. The failure to apply the same measures and definitions of exposure to ETS over the duration of the study is just one of several egregious deviatons from a credible prospective research design.

The study Objective: "measure the relation between ETS as determied by smoking in spouses and long-term mortality from tobacco related disease," is bizarre and misleading. How can one possibly expect to determine the relationship between ETS and tobacco-related mortality by defining ETS as "spousal smoking" alone. The authors apparently elected to discount the obvious fact that during the first two decades of the study period the public was awash in ETS, at home, in the workplace and in social gatherings. This problem and the failure to use consistent measures of ETS exposure throughout the study make any interpretation of study findings an excercise in futility.

I believe this study to be good in effort but has significant problems in methodology and analysis bringing into question the validity of the study itself.

[kster]

29. Woman should have their tobacco limited

that will be next if history repeats itself...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2873884#2875831

[Bandit]

27. Why do smokers think they have a right to force their filth on society?

Why can't they keep their filthy habits/addictions in their home where my grandchildren don't have to be exposed to them? Evidently they think ythey are better than every one else even though smokers only make up 25% of the population they think they should run roughshod over everyone else..I think smoking in public should be a jailable offense just as using any other addicting drug is..

[kster]

28. "Heil Hiltler"

The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933-45

Robert N Proctor, professor of the history of science a a Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States

Historians and epidemiologists have only recently begun to explore the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, encompassing bans on smoking in public spaces, bans on advertising, restrictions on tobacco rations for women, and the world's most refined tobacco epidemiology, linking tobacco use with the already evident epidemic of lung cancer. The anti-tobacco campaign must be understood against the backdrop of the Nazi quest for racial and bodily purity, which also motivated many other public health efforts of the era.

Medical historians in recent years have done a great deal to enlarge our understanding of medicine and public health in Nazi Germany. We know that about half of all doctors joined the Nazi party and that doctors played a major part in designing and administering the Nazi programmes of forcible sterilisation, "euthanasia," and the industrial scale murder of Jews and gypsies.1 2 Much of our present day concern for the abuse of humans used in experiments stems from the extreme brutality many German doctors showed towards concentration camp prisoners exploited to advance the cause of German military medicine.3

Tobacco in the Reich

One topic that has only recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.4 5 6 Germany had the world's strongest antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the race.1 4 Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders of Europe--Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco--were all non-smokers.7 Hitler was the most adamant, characterising tobacco as "the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man for having been given hard liquor." At one point the Fuhrer even suggested that Nazism might never have triumphed in Germany had he not given up smoking.8

German smoking rates rose dramatically in the first six years of Nazi rule, suggesting that the propaganda campaign launched during those early years was largely ineffective.4 5 German smoking rates rose faster even than those of France, which had a much weaker anti-tobacco campaign. German per capita tobacco use between 1932 and 1939 rose from 570 to 900 cigarettes a year, whereas French tobacco consumption grew from 570 to only 630 cigarettes over the same period.


http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/313/7070/1450

[Bandit]

32. The Nazis built highways as well, and so did America

America has to be the same as Nazi Germany then..Damn the Nazis built rockets as well.Your post just goes to show that some things Hitler wanted made damn good sense..Are you stupid enough to believe just because Hitler wanted something that automatically made it a bad thing...Probably so or you wouldn't have posted what you did..and to encourage smoking in public..That takes real wisdom for sure...

[Guaranteed]

33. Why do you think you have the right to force your idiotic mind on others?

Honestly, while you might think you have something to say, nobody wants to hear this garbage your brain comes up with. Just because you're thinking this shit, it doesn't mean you're justified in publishing it on such a widespread level. These ideas we see from you are entirely disgusting, and you shouldn't be posting, at all.



There. Now you know what it's like to be a smoker.