The Butt Stops Here

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

On a bright, brisk spring afternoon last week, Bill Clinton threw out the first ball at the Cleveland Indians' opening-day game. But his pitch, high and over the plate, was more than the usual springtime rite. The President helped kick off the baseball season in Jacobs Field, a sleek, brand-new, $169 million stadium, a large chunk of which was financed by a 4.5 cents-a-pack local tax on cigarettes. Yet no one, no matter where they are sitting, is permitted to smoke in the open-air stands.

For antismoking activists in the U.S., the game these days is hardball.

For years, smokers and nonsmokers have managed an uneasy truce: Live and let live (or let die). You stay in your section; I'll stay in mine (but don't blow in this direction). Yet that truce is crumbling like a Bosnian cease-fire. In the past few months, a rash of new restrictions, legislation and governmental tough talk has elevated the antismoking campaign to new heights. Before, it was a matter of health warnings, moral persuasion and segregation of the warring parties. Now smoking is in danger of being legislated virtually out of existence -- or at least shoved into the realm of behavior so socially reviled that it must be practiced only in private.

The scene outside a posh new smoke-free office building in West Los Angeles is typical. Smokers who want to light up have to go out back, near the delivery-truck entrance, and gather next to the Dumpster. Yet Susan Castor, a production assistant for a cable-TV company, has accepted her thrice-daily trips to the Dumpster with surprising equanimity. "I'd just as soon smoke out here and not have my smoke bother anyone," says Castor, who describes herself as a light smoker. "I think it should be that way."

These forlorn scenes may be just a transitional phase. "I foresee that one day America will be smoke-free," says Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. She adds, "But not in my lifetime. We have 40 million people who are addicted to smoking. We've got to help them get over their addiction, and that's going to take a while."

The process, however, is being pushed forward on a variety of fronts:

A House subcommittee headed by California Democrat Henry Waxman will vote next week on the Smoke-Free Environment Act, perhaps the most sweeping antismoking legislation Congress has ever seriously considered. If the bill becomes law, buildings entered by 10 or more people each day -- including bars, restaurants and almost every structure that isn't someone's home -- will have to become smoke-free zones or face fines of up to $5,000 a day. Another House subcommittee has proposed raising the cigarette tax a whopping $1.25 a pack, largely to help finance health-care reform. Congress last month passed, and President Clinton signed, a bill that outlaws smoking in all public and some private schools. And last Friday U.S. Department of Defense restrictions went into effect that ban smoking in all military work spaces, ranging from military bases to tanks on the battlefield.

States and localities are cracking down on smoking even more aggressively. In May, Maryland will institute the tightest statewide restrictions in the nation, banning smoking in virtually all workplaces, except in sealed, separately ventilated rooms. Rules go into effect in the state of Washington in September that will forbid smoking in all enclosed private and public offices. The city of Davis, California, has outlawed smoking in all offices, restaurants, outdoor cafes -- and even at the town's annual Fourth of July fireworks display. (The fireworks can smoke, but people can't.) The New Jersey Supreme Court, in a case that could have nationwide impact, ruled last month that municipalities have the right to ban cigarette-vending machines.

The health effects of smoking are drawing new attention from federal regulators. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has proposed a ban on almost all indoor smoking in the workplace. Even more significant, the activist Food and Drug Administration is taking a look at whether to classify nicotine as a drug -- a move that could effectively remove cigarettes from the over-the-counter market. FDA commissioner David Kessler told Congress he believes that nicotine is a "highly addictive agent" and that cigarette producers control the level of nicotine "that creates and sustains this addiction."

Even without federal prodding, an increasing number of private companies are moving to satisfy the antismoking mood. McDonald's has banned smoking in 1,400 of its company-owned fast-food restaurants in the U.S. Amtrak announced this month that 82% of its trains (up from 62%) will henceforth be smoke free. An estimated one-third of the nation's 1,800 enclosed shopping malls are expected to forbid smoking by the end of this year. Cleveland's stadium is one of 20 * major-league baseball parks to go smokeless; the American Medical Association has urged the majors to ban smoking in all 28. Tobacco companies are under increasing fire for alleged misconduct and cover-ups. Last month Representative Waxman charged that in 1983 tobacco giant Philip Morris discovered the first strong evidence that nicotine is addictive but suppressed the study. Waxman has called the top brass from Philip Morris and six other cigarette firms to testify before his subcommittee about their practices in hearings this week that promise to attract widespread attention. Attorney Melvin Belli is leading a coalition of high-profile lawyers that has filed a $5 billion class-action suit on behalf of everyone who has ever been addicted to nicotine. Said Belli: "We will prove that the tobacco industry has conspired to catch you, hold you and kill you." The ABC News magazine show Day One, in a report on Kessler's FDA investigation, leveled tough charges that cigarette companies "manipulate" the nicotine content of their cigarettes to keep customers smoking -- charges that have prompted a libel suit from Philip Morris. CBS's 60 Minutes weighed in with a report suggesting that cigarette manufacturers conspired to keep fire-safe cigarettes off the market.

Why is everyone suddenly jumping on the antismoking bandwagon? After all, critics have been proclaiming the dangers of smoking for hundreds of years. King James I of England in 1604 branded the habit "loathsome." Even Adolf Hitler was a fanatical opponent of tobacco; signs declaring DEUTSCHE WEIBER RAUCHEN NICHT (German women do not smoke) were posted throughout the Third Reich during World War II.

U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry in 1964 issued his landmark report linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, and a stream of reforms soon followed. In 1966 cigarette makers were forced to put labels on their packages warning consumers about the health risks of smoking. In 1971 cigarette ads were barred from TV and radio. The medical evidence against smoking, meanwhile, continued to mount; cigarettes were linked to heart disease, emphysema and low-birth- weight babies. In 1986, when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released one of the first widely publicized reports on the detrimental effects of passive smoke, the issue shifted from personal health (what smokers are doing to themselves) to environmental damage (what they are doing to others).

Yet nothing has galvanized today's antismoking activists as much as the / Environmental Protection Agency report released a year ago that classified environmental tobacco smoke as a class-A carcinogen and estimated that 3,000 nonsmokers die each year from lung cancer as a result of other people's smoke. The tobacco industry is currently challenging the findings in court, but the report dealt a serious blow to so-called smokers' rights that's still being felt.

"The irrefutable medical evidence on secondhand smoke," says Mark Green, New York City public advocate and a longtime supporter of antismoking measures, "has been the booster rocket launching the antismoking movement into orbit." Notes an EPA official: "We had no real sense of how big this report was going to be. But it has become the major catalyst for the reforms we're seeing all over the country."

The growing health and environmental warnings coincided with a shift in the political climate. President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton sent a message that the war on smoking was getting personal when they banned smoking in the White House on Inauguration Day. Congress, meanwhile, has seen an influx of environmentally concerned baby boomers, along with a decline in the traditional power of tobacco-state legislators. Despite continued lavish spending by the tobacco lobby to try to influence Congress, for the first time members of the antismoking Congressional Task Force on Tobacco and Health outnumber pro-tobacco House members, 58 to 42. "The tobacco industry, while still a powerful force, has lost its virtual stranglehold on Congress," says antismoking activist John Banzhaf, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health.

Antismoking sentiment has also been sparked by a disturbing trend in cigarette use. After declining every year since 1974, the percentage of smokers in the population leveled off in 1991 and has stabilized at around 26%. What's more, smoking among certain groups, such as African Americans and the young, may be creeping up: the percentage of high school seniors who smoke increased from 17.2% in 1992 to 19% in 1993. Antismoking activists are growing more alarmed -- and more aggressive. "I can't think of another product that, faced with the scientific evidence which is associated with tobacco, could remain a legal product on the market and almost completely exempt from regulation," says Scott Ballin, executive director of the Washington-based Coalition on Smoking OR Health.

On both sides of the great smoking divide, attitudes seem to be changing. - The angry outbursts by smokers that greeted the initial blizzard of antismoking activity have, in many cases, been replaced by a sense of resignation, almost fatalism. Marcia Spurlock, an Atlanta mortgage lender, smokes 1 1/2 packs a day and goes out of her way not to irritate nonsmokers. "I'll stand outside in the freezing cold to have a cigarette instead of offending anyone," she says. Dave Wahl, an art director for Ogilvy & Mather advertising in Los Angeles, seems equally resigned to traipsing outside his office building whenever he wants a few puffs. "You can't deny it's a dirty habit," he says. "If someone wants to smoke, they should be forced outside."

The tobacco industry too is adjusting its attitudes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cigarette smoke kills about418,000 people a year, making it the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. For years, however, the cigarette companies maintained a hard line on the medical front, insisting that the evidence linking their product to cancer and other health problems was inconclusive. Today Thomas Lauria, assistant to the president of the Tobacco Institute, opens his defense of smoking this way: "I think that since the '60s, studies have shown that cigarette smoking has been linked as an important risk factor for emphysema, heart disease, lung cancer and other serious problems."

Instead of arguing on health grounds, the tobacco industry now tends to recast the debate as a freedom-of-choice issue. "There are a certain amount of adult consumers who want to enjoy tobacco products," says Lauria. "And like those who drink alcohol or who enjoy high-risk sports activities, it is really up to the individual adult to determine what's appropriate for their own conduct."

Cigarette advertising, meanwhile, has become more savvy. Despite continued complaints about ads that seem targeted at young people -- like the infamous Joe Camel campaign -- cigarette companies claim their marketing efforts today are aimed at keeping the customers they have rather than winning new ones. "It's like preaching to the choir," says Sheri Bridges, assistant professor of management at Wake Forest University's M.B.A. school. "Tobacco companies know who their customers are and where they live. They are focusing on those people who already smoke."

Humor is another tactic. Philip Morris has launched a campaign for Benson & Hedges that satirizes the nation's ongoing antismoking fervor. In the new / ads, smokers puff away on rooftops, window ledges and even airplane wings. The tag line: "The length you go to for pleasure." Karen Daragan, manager of media programs for Philip Morris U.S.A., calls it "our empathy campaign." Says she: "It makes smokers feel like they're not alone out there, and they're not the bad guy -- that they are 50 million strong, and they should be able to enjoy a cigarette in public places."

Besides courting its friends, the tobacco industry is also coming down hard on its foes. Philip Morris has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against ABC for its Day One reports charging that the tobacco industry "artificially adds nicotine to cigarettes to keep people smoking and boost profits." Says Herbert M. Wachtell, the attorney representing Philip Morris in the suit: "The basic allegation of the programs -- that the company spikes its tobacco with additional nicotine during the manufacturing process -- is just fundamentally and flatly untrue." The network says it stands by its reporting. (A Day One source says Philip Morris refused requests for an on- camera interview and gave "totally unresponsive" answers to written questions.)

The tobacco industry is becoming more aggressive on the political front as well. In California, for example, where more than half the nation's estimated 600 local antismoking ordinances have been enacted, the tobacco industry is trying a pre-emptive strike. According to antismoking activists in the state, cigarette companies are behind a "citizens' group" supporting an initiative that would institute statewide restrictions against smoking. The catch is that the measure is milder than the many local ordinances it would override.

But more than just tobacco-industry executives and die-hard smokers are raising questions about the current antismoking frenzy. Has the crusade turned into a witch-hunt? Will the campaign to ban smoking simply make the forbidden weed another rebellious turn-on for kids? What sort of policy sense does it make to try to legislate smoking out of existence at the same time that the government is becoming increasingly dependent on tobacco as a source of tax revenue? And for all the new efforts to enact tough restrictions on smoking, how widely does the American public support them?

A TIME/CNN poll taken last week by Yankelovich Partners found that the support is less than overwhelming. Only 47% of nonsmokers felt that smoking should be banned in restaurants (48% preferred setting up special areas for smokers), and just 44% thought it should be forbidden in offices. Tolerance seems the watchword: only 31% of nonsmokers agreed with a statement that our society should do everything possible to stamp out smoking.

In a backlash to the antismoking movement, some smokers have taken to celebrating their indulgence, at least in the presence of their like-minded comrades. In Palm Beach, Florida, the tony Chesterfield hotel holds monthly cigar nights; the restaurant closes to the public, then invites cigar smokers, for $125 a person, to a black-tie evening of cocktails, a five-course meal and all the cigars they can smoke. It is just one of dozens of such cloudy gatherings that are organized coast to coast each month. Gordon Mott, managing editor of Cigar Aficionado magazine, calls them "the speakeasies of the '90s."

Actor Matthew Modine won acclaim at this year's Sundance Film Festival for his short film Smoking, in which a nerdy smoker tries to cope with ever more burdensome restrictions on his beloved habit. Modine sees poetry in partaking. "There are times which are just really fantastic cigarette moments," says Modine. "That postcoital cigarette, or that cold winter night walking down the street. There's nothing more comforting than holding a burning ember in your hands and sucking the smoke into your lungs. The coffeehouse cigarette. The cigarette after a couple of pints of lager."

Richard Klein, author of the 1993 book Cigarettes Are Sublime, also praises the contribution that smoking has made to our culture. "The power that cigarettes exercise and have exercised in various forms over the centuries," he says, "has something to do not only with their utility as a source of consolation and personal help but also as a tool for mitigating anxiety, as in wartime, and also as a spur to concentration."

Yet the antismoking forces have their idealistic side too. Dr. Jonathan Fielding, a UCLA professor of public health and former Massachusetts commissioner of health, argues that banning smoking once and for all will remove a barrier that is separating Americans. "Smoking has become associated with lower educational attainment and lower social status," he says. "It becomes divisive in a sense. In a country where we have too many things that divide people, this is another thing dividing us."

And both sides can argue history. Smoking proponents warn that the current antismoking campaign could end up like Prohibition in the 1920s: banning cigarettes would be impossible to enforce and would only increase their outlaw appeal. "I think there's a strict analogy here," says Klein. "Both drugs have been used by cultures since the dawn of civilization; they can have very deleterious effects on society, but trying to ban them by law brings about circumstances which are much worse."

But Mark Pertschuk, executive director of the national organization Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, based in Berkeley, California, thinks another historical paradigm is more apt. Around the turn of the century, chewing tobacco was popular, and spittoons were commonplace in bars and restaurants. When an epidemic of tuberculosis broke out and the disease was linked to spittoons, a doctors' group that eventually became the American Lung Association campaigned to have them removed. "At the time, it was considered to be outrageous and anti-American to get rid of spittoons," says Pertschuk. "When historians look back on this ((smoking)) controversy in 25 years, they will think it was very strange that there were ashtrays and smokers in bars."

As usual, everything comes full circle. Baseball fans can no longer light up while cheering on their team at many stadiums. And about the only place left where one sees chewing tobacco anymore is at the ballpark.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 800 Adult Americans, 605 of them nonsmokers, taken for TIME/CNN on April 6-7 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 3-5% and plus or minus 4%, respectivley. Not Sures omitted

CAPTION:Should smoking be banned from work places, should there be special smoking areas, or should there be no restrictions?

Should the federal tax on cigarettes be raised to $1.25 to pay for health care reform?

Which do you agree with more?

Smoking is a bad habit and society should do everything possible to stamp it out.

It's bad, but everyone should have the right to make his or her own choice whether to smoke.

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/New York, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Ted Scala/Cleveland, Dick Thompson/Washington and James Willwerth/Los Angeles