Tobacco.org

• Snuffing Out Puffing Neighbors  

Multiunit housing is one of the few remaining places where the boundary lines between smokers and everybody else are still as amorphous as the wispy streaks left by a cigarette. But emboldened by renters like the Corleys and condo owners who are no longer content to hold their noses around unwanted secondhand smoke, a coalition of anti-smoking groups is preparing to scale the walls of one of the last smoker havens. Their tactics promise to be subtle: condition the public through education at the local level, roll out a bunch of examples - landlords or condo associations that banned smoking voluntarily - and gradually make smoke-free housing the norm. . . .

With just 18 percent of Massachusetts adults describing themselves as smokers, the balance of power has shifted so dramatically that, over the past year, nearly a third of the calls to a complaint line set up by the state to monitor compliance with the 2004 smoke-free workplace law were gripes about unwanted smoke at home. . . .

Yet there will always be those smokers - like the Corleys' neighbor - who couldn't care less whether their habit is causing coughing spasms in the apartment next door. For that reason, this tiptoeing toward smoke-free housing is unsatisfying to Michael Siegel, a professor at Boston University's School of Public Health and a bit of a maverick within anti-smoking circles. Siegel supports a more all-encompassing approach that still stops short of a ban: ordinances that declare secondhand smoke entering a residence a "public nuisance." . . . .

Siegel's proposal is unlikely to get much traction within an anti-smoking coalition bent on avoiding conflict. Until Massachusetts gets its own smoke-free registry up and running, renters stuck with secondhand smoke will just have to continue apartment-hopping.

Jump to full article »