Smoking ordinance will backfire

The Calabasas City Council last week gave final approval to an ordinance that expands its existing widespread outdoor smoking ban to regulate smoking in all rental units in the city.

This ordinance is an example of a city government that has run amok. It is an example of extremely poor public health policy that not only fails to achieve a significant public health purpose but actually makes the problem much worse that it would otherwise have to be. It intrudes upon landlords' autonomy in the operation of their businesses without any valid public health justification.

In Calabasas apartments, smoking is essentially randomly distributed and thus it minimizes the chances that levels of smoke in any particular apartment will be extremely high. However, if smoking units are all grouped in the same area, levels of tobacco smoke in those areas are going to be extremely high.

This ordinance maximizes, rather than reduces, the possibility that secondhand smoke is going to become a problem for some apartment residents.

Why would any nonsmoker want to live adjacent to the heavily concentrated smoking units in an apartment complex? For those people there is going to be a problem with secondhand smoke where one may very well not have existed before.

The nonsmokers are actually better off without this ordinance, because at least there is some possible recourse if smoking in apartments is not regulated. But once the regulations specifically permit landlords to designate 20 percent of their units as smoking units, there is little recourse for nonsmokers who will now almost assuredly be affected by smoke, even if they weren't affected before the ordinance.

This ordinance essentially institutionalizes the problem of tobacco smoke exposure among nonsmoking apartment residents. Michael Siegel Professor, Boston University School of Public Health