Coda
We don't like the smoke, but we do like the money
Greg Bean

The sad fact is that we can moralize all we want about the evils of tobacco, pass all the punitive laws aimed at smokers we want, but at root we're a society of hypocrites.

There's a word for people who drive around smoking while they have kids in the car, and that word is idiot.

If you happen to be driving through Keyport in the near future, and you're smoking with little children as passengers, there's another word that will describe you: criminal.

On April 24, the Keyport Borough Council passed an ordinance that would allow police to issue a $75 ticket to anyone stopped for a primary traffic offense who happens to be smoking with children in the car at the same time. The law is the first in the state at the municipal level, but Sen. Raymond J. Lesniak (D-Union) has said he plans to ask the Senate Judiciary Committee to consider a statewide ban next month.

Two weeks ago, when Keyport was considering this ordinance, we editorialized in Greater Media Newspapers' publication the Independent that passing the measure in Keyport was a bad idea for a couple of reasons. First, we thought it would be difficult to enforce, since Keyport is a very small town and people passing through on Route 35 or Route 36 might not even know they were breaking the law. The law, we said, would be unfair to nonresidents.

Second, we reasoned that in an effort to keep the state from becoming a patchwork quilt of municipalities with their own ordinances on the issue, it would be better to wait until the state passes its own law that would apply to everyone.

I have absolutely no doubt that within a year or two, the lawmakers in Trenton will pass a law making it illegal for anyone to smoke in an automobile when children are along for the ride. Like the members of the Keyport Borough Council, our state senators and Assembly representatives can't pass up a chance to enact some feel-good legislation to make it look like they're actually doing something down there, especially if it's "for the children."

And when it passes, I also predict that it will be just as effective in preventing the child passengers of smokers from being subjected to clouds of secondhand smoke in an enclosed space as the state's efforts a few years back to ban people from talking on their cell phones while driving.

In other words, it's not gonna work.

If a smoking parent is enough of an idiot to force the dangerous and noxious fumes of their habit on the young lungs of their children on the ride to McDonald's for yet another Happy Meal, they're not going to be deterred from their idiocy by the possibility of a $75 fine.

If we want to create a real deterrent, I say we have to stop thinking up piddling ways to punish a group of addicts (smokers) for their addiction and do something decisive.

If our lawmakers truly want to enact legislation to protect us from ourselves and get some national attention in the bargain, it's time to go for the gold ring and set a real example. It's time to outlaw the sale and use of tobacco products in this state altogether. It's time to make it a crime to purchase and use cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco or any other tobacco product in the state of New Jersey. It's time to make it an even greater crime to sell those products.

We've been picking at the edges of this problem for more than a decade, passing one little law after another to punish and marginalize smokers. We've made it a crime to smoke in bars, restaurants and other public spaces. We've made it a crime to smoke at the beach. In some communities, we've made it a crime to smoke within a designated distance from the door or window of a bar or restaurant, where secondhand smoke might drift inside and be inhaled by an innocent bystander.

None of those laws has made a significant impact on the number of people who smoke, or the number of people who die in this state every year as a direct result of abusing highly carcinogenic and highly addictive tobacco products.

Deep down, we all know the only legislation that will have a meaningful impact on the number of tobacco-related deaths in this country is to declare tobacco as addictive and deadly as heroin and outlaw its sale and use completely.

But will our state lawmakers - or the lawmakers in any other state - take the one truly effective step in this battle?

Not a chance.

The sad fact is that we can moralize all we want about the evils of tobacco, pass all the punitive laws aimed at smokers we want, but at root we're a society of hypocrites.

In New Jersey, which at $2.58 a pack (about 13 cents per cigarette) has the highest state cigarette tax in the country, the state government collected almost $789 million in tobacco tax last year. That's a dramatic increase from the $388 million the state collected in 2002, when New Jersey wasn't quite as desperate for revenue to close a huge budget gap.

And without that revenue, next year the budget gap could be nearly $5 billion instead of the $4 billion gap we faced last year. To fill a gap that size, we'd not only have to sell the New Jersey Turnpike and the state lottery, we'd have to start stripping the copper piping out of state buildings to sell for scrap.

In other words, we need smokers, we need their money, and the last thing anyone in state government - or national government, for that matter - wants is for smokers to quit en masse.

That's a Great American Smoke-out we just couldn't afford, and we ought to be honest enough, at least with ourselves, to admit it.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at gbean@gmnews.com.