Michael Siegel writes this week about San Francisco and Boston’s forthcoming regulations to ban the sale of cigarettes in pharmacies:
According to the Globe article, the reason for the ban on tobacco sales at pharmacies and on college campuses is that selling tobacco is inconsistent with the mission of these institutions: “the city decided to target sales at the 74 pharmacies in Boston … because stocking tobacco, the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, is incompatible with the mission of a drugstore. ‘Why, in a place where people go to get healthy and get information about staying healthy, would you want to sell something that has absolutely no redeeming value and ends up killing a lot of people?’ said Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission.” […]
[T]hese regulations are not going to advance any direct protection of the public’s health. They are not intended to directly improve the public’s health. Instead, the intention is to prevent certain retail establishments from taking an action that is viewed as being inconsistent with their mission. In other words, the regulation is intended not to regulate the public’s health, but to regulate the consistency of a mission of a store with its actions.
I just don’t see the role of government in regulating the consistency of stores’ mission and actions.
I agree. However the logic behind bans on smoking in restaurants and bars, measures that Siegel supports, isn’t very different. The laws assume that providing patrons with a place to smoke together is not essential to the mission of serving food and drink and can therefore be legislated away for the safety of the workers. If it was essential, then presumably employees would be allowed to assume the risks as they do in so many far more dangerous industries.
Allowing smoking is clearly part of the mission for many bars and restaurants. Some bans take this into account by allowing for exceptions, but these are usually far too strict. Some bans make no exceptions at all. This is coercive against smokers who can no longer find places to associate together, against business owners who can’t set their own policies, and against workers who may prefer that environment. If Siegel really values autonomy, this ought to be a concern for him.
(Note that opposing bans would still leave plenty of options on the table for reducing smoking in bars and restaurants, such as offering tax breaks to businesses that go smoke free. Opposing bans would not necessarily entail giving up on public health.)
Actually the smoking ban in workplaces was enacted primarily to protect the health of those who could be exposed to 2nd hand smoke. I don’t ever recall “the mission” of workplaces every being part of the debate.
I’m not a smoker but I think these new regulations go too far. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that smoking outside is harmful to anyone but the person who’s smoking.
Comment by billy jack — September 5, 2008 @ 9:51 pm