Change alcohol, cigarette laws to deter, protect

A WAVE OF CITY ordinances, a gubernatorial tax hike proposal and growing alarm over the toll drinking is taking not just on our highways but also on our children have lifted cigarettes and alcohol near the top of the list of issues the General Assembly needs to address this year.

The past year saw anti-smoking ordinances spreading like a tidal wave across the state, as municipal leaders responded to public demands to protect diners and workers from the danger of secondhand smoke. That would be an acceptable, though not ideal, way to approach the issue but for one problem: Lawmakers took action in 1996 to prohibit local prohibitions.

One judge has ruled that attempt invalid, but we’re far from a final decision — a decision the Legislature could and should render unnecessary by repealing the local pre-emption law or, better still, protecting all workers from secondhand smoke in the same way we protect them from other known workplace dangers.

The other smoking issue isn’t new: Lawmakers can reduce the number of kids who start smoking by simply raising our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax. Gov. Mark Sanford’s plan to increase it from 7 cents to 37 cents a pack is a start, but that would still leave our tax at just a third of the national average. And while increasing this tax would be smart even if we burned the money, the governor hasn’t made a sufficient case for further reducing our already-low overall tax burden.

A more direct approach is needed to deter underage drinking. Lawmakers can make it harder for minors to get alcohol with a social host law that makes it illegal for adults to knowingly allow underage drinking on their property, a registration system that helps police track the purchase of kegs and repeal of a law that makes it impossible for police to run stings against clerks who sell alcohol to minors. They also should bring penalties for crimes involving beer and wine into line with penalties for liquor, make it illegal for minors to merely attempt to purchase or consume alcohol and strip kids caught with alcohol of their driver’s licenses.

We’ve long known that our illegal per se law, which allegedly makes it a crime on its face to drive with a blood-alcohol content of 0.08 or more, was too riddled with loopholes to be usable. This year we learned that even when people are convicted under a less stringent law that allows high alcohol levels for people who can convince a jury they didn’t seem “drunk,” many of them are allowed to plead to lesser crimes. That means they never take the law seriously.

So in addition to closing the loophole so the per se law can be enforced, lawmakers need to provide meaningful deterrents to drinking and driving: seizing license plates or even the vehicles from repeat drunken drivers; getting a program actually working to make it physically impossible for people to start their cars after they’ve been drinking; taking immediate administrative action against repeat offenders, rather than letting them keep driving while they drag their cases through the overburdened courts. While they’re at it, they also should set higher penalties for drivers who won’t take a breath test and set tougher drunkenness standards for people who have already been convicted once of DUI.

There’s nothing radical about any of these policies: Most are the norm nationwide; those that aren’t are fast becoming so. They’re reasonable measures designed to protect the public from serious threats, and it’s time that our Legislature start taking them seriously.