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Tobacco giant runs KC’s smoking ban through a personal rights filter 

If anyone got singed in last week's smoking ban election, it was the Big Tobacco/small business alliance and those who saw the issue as a struggle over private business rights. In a free market, that is, where do you draw the line? . . .

To set a campaign-blurred record straight, the tobacco company contributed to the smoking ban campaign only after being asked to by local businesspeople, who were upfront about doing so with the media. They went to Reynolds because smoking-ban proponents dealt the casinos out of the bill to keep them from contributing to the campaign against it. . . .

"There has not been a lot of successful rollbacks of smoking bans," Singleton says. "There've been a few -- one of the first I can remember was Beverly Hills. One of the reasons there haven't been more is these small businesses are hit hard by a smoking ban, and sometimes they go out of business pretty quickly. So they're not around to fight. The other reason is they don't have a lot of resources as small businesses for prolonged legislative fights."

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