School smoking ban is the least lawmakers can do

THE LAST TIME lawmakers tried to protect public school students from cigarette smoke, they had to agree in return to prohibit cities and counties from banning smoking in local businesses. And even then, all they managed to wrest from the cigarette lobby and its protectors in our Legislature was a provision that allows local school boards to ban smoking on school grounds, and to comply with a federal law that outlaws it inside schools.

So it is no small thing that a local senator has announced plans to try to ban smoking on all public school property and at all school-sponsored events. The most noticeable effect of such a law would be to snuff out cigarettes at high school football games.

There’s no legitimate objection to such a ban, which a handful of S.C. school districts, as well as 35 states, already have. Safety isn’t a matter of local autonomy, to be left to individual districts. And we’re not talking about government telling businesses what to do; we’re talking about government setting the rules by which government will operate — specifically, protecting the children in its care from exposure to a deadly carcinogen that the U.S. surgeon general recently reported “has immediate adverse effects on the cardiovascular system,” especially in children, whose bodies are still developing, and increases the risk of heart disease and lung cancer by up to 30 percent.

A few smokers might think it outrageous for “the government” to tell them they can’t light up at the high school football or baseball game or track meet. But even most smokers realize that the primary purpose of all school events is the benefit of the students. The desires of adults should come in a distant second — particularly when those desires can cause physical harm to the students and serve no positive social value.

Indeed, Sen. Darrell Jackson says he chose this tack because he thought it would be easy to pass. “Sometimes in South Carolina,” he told The Associated Press, “we get more things accomplished with incremental steps.”

True enough. But that doesn’t negate the need for larger steps. This bill isn’t even the absolute minimum we should be able to expect from lawmakers.

We live in a state where at least one state agency still thinks nothing of spending $32,000 in tax money to build a shelter to make it more convenient for state employees to take smoke breaks on state time.

We live in the state that charges the lowest cigarette tax in the nation — a paltry 7 cents a pack — despite indisputable evidence that higher cigarette taxes reduce illegal teen smoking, by pricing kids out of the market. For that matter, we live in a state that couldn’t even get up the stomach to outlaw teen smoking until 2006.

And then there’s that pre-emption law that the cigarette companies got passed in 1996, in return for the minor concession of allowing school boards to outlaw smoking on campus. That law, despite assurances to the contrary from the mayor of Columbia, prohibits cities and counties from passing workplace smoking restrictions to protect workers from secondhand smoke, much as the state and federal governments protect workers from poor ventilation and stray needles.

By all means, the Legislature should outlaw smoking on public school grounds. It also should outlaw smoking in and on all state-owned property. It should raise the cigarette tax. And if it’s not ready to offer workplace safety protections to all citizens, it certainly should allow cities and counties to put the public health ahead of the cigarette industry’s interests.