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Even more smokers will become huddling masses, lighting up outside if a push to ban smoking in bars gains support.
Smokefree Boise announced plans last week to ask the Boise City Council to ban all smoking in bars within the city limits. The group plans to take its request to the council this summer.
A similar statewide ban went into effect last year, keeping smokers out of bowling allies. The argument in that case was that families, including children, often frequent bowling allies, and children should not be subjected to secondhand smoke.
This time, the reasoning centers on the health of those who work in bars, who are forced to suck in an alarming amount of secondhand smoke for hours on end.
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A coalition of health-minded groups tonight will kick off an effort to ban smoking at all Boise bars.
By summer, Smokefree Boise hopes to ask the Boise City Council to pass an ordinance banning smoking at bars within the city, said Katie Whittier, community organizer for the Coalition for a Healthy Idaho, fighting tobacco use in Idaho.
"Bars are the last workplace where workers are exposed to smoke during their shifts," Whittier said.
Research shows exposure to second-hand smoke for one hour is the equivalent of smoking two cigarettes, she said.
The Associate Students of Boise State has recently passed legislation that will make BSU a tobacco-free campus. This ban on tobacco will, of course, entail both smoking and smokeless tobacco. A committee has been appointed to oversee the instatement of the new policies.
Gabe Murphy, an ASBSU senator and an opinion writer for The Arbiter has been appointed to be a member on the committee. In his article, "Smoke and gas," he compared the impoliteness of smoking in public to you-know-what. . . .
Should students and faculty really have to wait until they have time to leave campus to smoke? Residence hall students may have to walk across the street to smoke. And what of chewing tobacco, which has far fewer affects on others, but will also be banned?
This policy has good intentions, and I am in favor of the prohibition of tobacco. However, without tobacco being universally banned it will be difficult, if not impossible, to effectively remove it from campus.
A judge in Boise has ordered an Internet tobacco seller to pay a $163,225 fine for violating state cigarette-sales laws.
Scott Maybee, of Salamanca, N.Y., was accused of violating state law by selling cigarettes not listed on an Idaho directory and by selling cigarettes at retail without obtaining a tobacco permit from the Department of Health and Welfare.
Maybee sold more than two million cigarettes in violation of Idaho law, Attorney General Lawrence Wasden said. Maybee sells cigarettes over the Internet under several names, including smartsmoker.com, ordersmokesdirect.com and buycheapcigarettes.com. . . .
A Boise lawyer for Maybee says Maybee reported his sales to the state, unlike most out-of-state dealers who do not.
J. Walter Sinclair, a principal in the Stoel Rives law firm, said he would appeal Sticklen's ruling. He said tobacco makers may seek to reduce payments to Idaho under a decade-old nationwide tobacco settlement if the state fails to enforce these laws against other dealers.
Idaho State University-Boise professor Galen Louis has received a $240,000 grant from the American Legacy Foundation to help create an anti-smoking campaign targeting Hispanic teenagers in Canyon County. But there's a twist.
Louis' research associates won't be public health experts. They'll be teenagers from the Nampa-Caldwell area, who'll decide the most effective way to get their message out.
Illinois' fledgling smoking ban faced a court challenge Tuesday that could result in it being voided.
Karla Carrington, who works behind the bar at a Spring Valley, Ill., tavern, was cited for allegedly allowing a patron to light up but contends that she shouldn't have been charged and that the law is unenforceable.
Specifically at issue is language in the Smoke-Free Illinois Act that seems to limit penalties only to the smokers and not bar or restaurant employees.
But Carrington's lawyer, Dan O'Day, told the Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star that the Illinois Legislature passed a flawed statute that should be thrown out entirely.
Smoking is being phased out at Rapid City's Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, site of this weekend's South Dakota State Dart Tournament, which means the next time Rapid City hosts it in 2010, the building will be smoke-free.
This year's tourney has attracted about 4,000 people - many of whom smoke.
Participants Amy Goodrich and Heather Wurts of Highmore say the civic center may see numbers dwindle if the city doesn't reinstate a smoking exception for the dart tournament.
Sure, Idaho may have the third-lowest smoking rate in the nation. Only 15.8 percent of the state's high school students smoke - the national average is 23 percent.
But that's not enough, said Bill Corr, executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a Washington, D.C.-based activist group. In a report released earlier this month, Corr criticized the Idaho Legislature and Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter for not spending more of the state's tobacco settlement and tax money on prevention efforts.
The state, he said Wednesday, will spend less than 2 percent of this year's income from tobacco taxes and the 1998 state tobacco settlement - an estimated $81.9 million - on tobacco prevention that meets recommendations set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That, he said, secures Idaho's position "among the most disappointing" states.
"Tobacco still takes a very high toll, even though Idaho has a better-than-average rate," Corr said. His group estimates smokers - including the 1,700 new children under 18 who become regular smokers each year - cost the state $319 million a year in health care.
Fixing the problem, Corr said, would only require increasing funding from $1.4 million to $11 million, the minimum amount recommended for the state by the CDC. But legislators on the state's Joint Millennium Fund Committee - which provides spending recommendations to the Legislature - said they think the state has come a long way already and that their way of doling out tobacco funds works.
"And we don't have $11 million," said co-chair Rep. Dennis Lake, R-Blackfoot. "We take our best shot at how to use the money most efficiently."
That's partly due to the fact that the state's tobacco tax money - 57 cents per pack - is dedicated to renovating the state capitol building.
An Idaho couple who federal prosecutors say were the ringleaders of a cigarette trafficking scheme that cost the state of Washington millions of dollars in uncollected taxes have been sentenced in federal court.
Peter Mahoney and Peggy Mahoney, operators of the Warpath Smoke Shop on the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation at Plummer, Idaho, were sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court for trafficking in contraband cigarettes, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Rice said Monday.
Two North Idaho residents who were involved in trafficking contraband cigarettes have been sentenced in U.S. District Court in Spokane.
Peter Mahoney, 54, was sentenced to 33 months in prison and his wife, Peggy Mahoney, 38, was sentenced to six months home detention as a condition of three years of probation.
The sentences were handed down Friday after a two-day hearing before Judge Robert Whaley.
A new tobacco product is hitting store shelves in many states and could soon be headed to Idaho.
It's a smokeless, spit-free alternative to chew or cigarettes -- known as snus (snoose). And it has health experts concerned.
"I can see where kids would possibly consider using it because it can't be seen in the mouth and because there is no spitting," said Joanne Graff, with Central District Health.
"Anybody, frankly, school teachers, principals, parents can't see it, can't smell it," said Adrean Casper, with the American Heart Association.
The State of Idaho will receive $3,750 from a legal settlement resolving allegations of illegal cigarette sales to Idaho retail stores, Attorney General Lawrence Wasden said today. Joseph Anderson, doing business as Smokin Joes, a New York-based company, agreed to the settlement to resolve alleged violations of the Idaho Tobacco Master Settlement Complementary Act.
In addition to the payment, Smokin Joes is prohibited from selling cigarettes that are not listed on the Attorney General's Directory of Compliant Tobacco Product Manufacturers and Brand Families. Smokin Joes must also report Idaho cigarette sales to the Attorney General as required by Idaho law.
Smokin Joes must pay an additional $3,750 to the State of Idaho if it violates any provisions of the settlement within the next five years.
Race car driver John Peterson is all about beating his opponents. But one thing he couldn't beat was smoking, until, that is, he found out about Nancy Caspersen's class.
Peterson smoked for 16 years and had accepted that he'd never be free of his tobacco addiction. Then he saw a flier for Caspersen's free smoking cessation class and decided to give it one more try. He quit for good in 2002.
"I was so excited to finally quit I wanted to help other people find the resource," Peterson said.
Now Peterson is trying to get the word out. His race car is sponsored by Project Filter and Idaho Quitnet, smoking cessation programs through the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. His motto: "We're hot -- but we're not smoking."
Peterson talks to school children about the dangers and addiction of tobacco, and spreads an anti-tobacco message in a sport known for embracing its use. Peterson's entire Number 83 car is an anti-smoking message; "Smoke Free 83."
Federal prosecutors are wrapping up -- without going to trial -- an investigation of eight people accused of smuggling millions of dollars worth of cigarettes from North Idaho to tribal smoke shops in western Washington.
A trial date was cancelled Friday with guilty pleas from four final defendants, including accused ringleader Louie Mahoney, of Plummer, Idaho.
The latest guilty pleas came eight months after at least three defendants from western Washington cut plea-bargain deals with federal prosecutors and agreed to testify against Mahoney and other co-conspirators living in North Idaho, court documents reveal.
The smuggling operation between 1999 and May 2003 cost the state of Washington an estimated $56 million in lost taxes, according to Jim McDevitt, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington.
A cigarette smuggling case in which authorities said Washington state lost about $56 million in tax revenue has ended in plea agreements with the man described as the ringleader and three other defendants.
Louie Mahoney, 61, who was said to have directed dealings in untaxed cigarettes from his home on the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in Idaho, pleaded guilty Friday in U.S. District Court to racketeering conspiracy and other charges. . . .
Louie Mahoney, doing business as JKL Enterprises, did not have a Coeur d'Alene tribal license to sell tobacco, according to documents filed in court by government lawyers.
He and the others were accused of money laundering, mail fraud, interstate transportation in aid of racketeering and cigarette record-keeping violations.
Investigators wrote that he ordered untaxed cigarettes from wholesale suppliers in Spokane and elsewhere, using two retail stores owned by relatives on the Coeur d'Alene reservations as fronts but arranging for deliveries to his home on U.S. Highway 95.