Smoking regulations work
Editorial, published The Tennessean , Thursday, 08/18/05

As if the Tennessee legislature needed another reason to allow local governments to regulate smoking, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have produced one more.

Americans are enjoying lower levels of secondhand smoke than they did 15 years ago, according to the CDC's National Report on Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. The report looked at secondhand smoke by-products, lead and environmental chemicals such as pesticides and insect repellents.

The conclusion: Restrictions on smoking in public places have made a difference in the amount of secondhand smoke showing up in non-smokers. Levels of cotinine, a product of nicotine after it enters the body, dropped 75% in adults and 68% in children from the early 1990s to 2002.

Its disturbing conclusions, however, on children should only increase the drive to adopt more regulations for public places where children might be exposed. The study showed that blacks had twice as much cotinine as white children or Mexican-American children. Overall levels in children were more than twice that in adults.

The harm documented from smoking in adults was bad enough. Five percent of smokers over 20 had cadmium in their blood stream in sufficient amounts to cause serious kidney injury.

But the study should also give hope to those who want to reduce children's exposure to secondhand smoke. The report on decreasing lead levels is nothing if not a textbook case on how public commitment has produced dramatic results. In the 1990s, 4.4% of children ages 1 to 5 had elevated lead levels. Between 1999 and 2002, the number dropped to 1.6%, the result of the removal of lead from gasoline and efforts to treat children who were exposed to lead contamination.

The study is a clarion call to regulation for those states that don't provide sufficient protection to their population. Tennessee lawmakers don't allow local communities to make decisions on smoking regulations vital to public health as the CDC report shows is needed. If nothing else has moved the legislature to permit stricter regulation of smoking, healthy children should.

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