Smokers still have a few weeks to practice puckering and puffing, with or without cancer sticks in their mouths.
Silent Night, Smokey Night
Nothing louder than the silent strains of shapeless cigarette smoke, drifting aimlessly over the (coughing) roof of City Hall, will be tolerated this spring.
Meanwhile, city staffers busily will be puffing away, presumably on smoke-free pencils, to craft an ordinance that will ban smoking for the rest of this century in city parks.
By the good, ol’ summertime, smokers will be less welcome in city parks than gun-totin’ drug pushers.
The ban, however, may turn out to be a boon for the brown bag lobby. Brown bags, offered in imaginative shadings, may become the fashion-free hot headwear of choice for inveterate smokers. Come June, puff daddies may have to dress up as Al Qaeda members in order to travel in respectable society.
Early in the slightly slanted discussion, it was helpfully pointed out that an all-park ban would be a simple enlargement of present state law that outlaws smoking within twenty-five feet of a tot play area.
Someone seriously said that legal distance would be prickly to judge since neither smokers nor non-smokers carry measuring devices with them. Both sides are reduced to guessing whether a smoker is twenty-four and a half or twenty-five and a half feet from a play area.
Asst. Police Chief Hank Davis concurred that it would be easier for his officers to enforce a comprehensive ban on smoking rather than being forced to play a measuring game.
Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger is credited with bringing the perceived need for a smoking prohibition to the attention of his City Council teammates.
Fate was not generous toward the evening’s prime sponsor. Mr. Silbiger faltered so markedly in launching his argument for the ban that each one of his colleagues leaped at him in a snarling mood.
Speaking globally, he said that “we live” in the most polluted city in the country. He was referring to Los Angeles. On the dais, his colleagues interpreted his target as Culver City and forcefully corrected him.
Same Town, Same Street, Same Town
The real show began more than a half-hour before the start of the Council meeting.
From all over the Los Angeles Basin, more than a dozen steely-eyed, hardcore believers in the beauty of the bans of smoking flocked to Culver City, of all places.
Emulating a football team going into a huddle or a combat unit preparing to charge onto the battlefield, they gathered in the lobby of Council Chambers. They listened carefully to a review of strategy. No chance they would be meeting in an old-fashioned smoke-filled room.
Utterly sincere soldiers, they seem to see themselves as gallant warriors in the never-ending war against the evils of smoking. These are the most unshakeable of the true believers.
They are characterized by several distinctions:
A significant number are young, idealistic, unmarried women Some represent agenda-driven organizations with long, blocky names that usually end with a phrase like a Smoke-Free Rosemead or Smoke-Free Beaches. Other persons identified themselves as students.
Second-hand smoke, they argued, is a killer, and they served up a truckload of supporting numbers.
No one, though, described the route of second-hand smoke, just the final score.
Uniformly, they boasted about the ever-expanding number of nearby communities that have eliminated smoking in city parks.
Sixteen people spoke. No one accused them of blowing smoke. They sounded like a traveling caravan, a fulltime road show, as they reeled off their hometowns. — San Gabriel, Torrance, Los Angeles. It was not explained how they all, by the darnedest coincidence, wound up on the same street in the same town on the same night.
Being on the same side, they all agreed, almost identically, with each other. The last fifteen rubber-stamped the first person.
Not one smoker dared to blow smoke in the opposite direction and issue a challenge.
To those who would suggest that forbidding smoking in city parks was squashing an American freedom, one man declared:
“There is no legal right to smoke.”
One Way To Be SAFE
Esther Schiller, from the cleverly named group SAFE, Smoke-free Air for Everyone, said “there is a misunderstanding that smoke dissipates in the air.” The trail, she said, is far more insidious and harmful.
The most solemn moment was left for Culver City resident Sherwood Kingsley. “I am a cancer survivor,” he said. “And yes, I did smoke.”
Easily the most entertaining speaker was a young woman from Palms. She said she and a friend went out on a butt collection hunt for just one hour.
Visiting three of Culver City’s parks, Lindberg, the Vets and Bill Botts Field, the women returned with a display guaranteed to make any smoker in the room sick.
She produced three otherwise healthy smelling water bottles. Only this time they were crammed with grossly unappetizing, stubbed-out cigarette butts. No owners in the crowd spoke up.
The anti-smoking proponents met no resistance on the City Council, although the lone Republican, Steve Rose, indicated a measure of anticipatory fear. He was concerned that zealotry for stamping out cigarettes could impinge on traditional freedoms.
Councilman Alan Corlin happily was positioned on the north end of the spectrum. He was the most articulate, most enthusiastic advocate on the Council for the city parks smoking ban.
Addressing the universal rationale for enacting a tighter law against smokers, Mr. Corlin said that non-smokers must be protected from smokers.
“Government’s job is to protect the health and welfare of its citizens,” he said. “By enacting a ban, we will be making a statement that Culver City places a premium on good health.”
To those who were wondering where the next smoking prohibition would strike, Mr. Corlin made his intentions clear. “I am done now,” he said.
