Sacramento Heat Over Smoke : Issue’s profile may rise as Senate debates anti-smoking bill amendments

Compared with the high-profile drama over the dangers of cigarettes now playing in Washington, the long-running debate over secondhand smoke in Sacramento has been a quiet sideshow.

There have been no squad of tobacco executives testifying before the Legislature on cigarette ingredients, no industry threats to sue individuals accused of leaking internal documents and no discussion of regulating cigarettes as a drug.

Instead, the Sacramento doings in recent months have centered on behind-the-scenes deals between legislators and lobbyists and on poison-pill amendments, designed to kill legislation rather than modify it. However, the sotto voce nature of this process could change today as the state Senate debates a final batch of such hostile amendments to what could become the first statewide workplace smoking ban in the nation.

If AB 13, sponsored by Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Brentwood), survives these last-ditch efforts to sabotage it, the bill could be before Gov. Pete Wilson within weeks. Its passage, intact and unadulterated, would be--and should be--headline news hailed as a major accomplishment for the measure’s broad coalition of supporters. More important, legislative approval would be a huge step forward for the health and welfare of every Californian.

Smoking is clearly dangerous--to smokers and to those around them. AB 13 would ban smoking in almost all indoor workplaces. It is supported by the California Restaurant Assn., the California Hotel and Motel Assn. and the California State Federation of Labor, not to mention scores of medical and public interest groups and city and county governments.

Indeed, because AB 13’s supporters include the very groups that would be involved most in its implementation, contentions by legislative opponents that the bill would prove costly to business carry little credibility. But those contentions do arouse serious questions about the integrity of lawmakers who doggedly are trying to block a reasonable bill that would benefit so many.