"Clearing the air about airport smoking lounges"

Sunday, May 26, 2002

Clearing the air about smoking lounges
By Susan Spano
The Los Angeles (CA) Times


The glassed-in smoking lounges in airports are a kind of hell Dante never
envisioned. Hazy, reeking and generally full of desperate-looking people,
they seem far worse than the entryways of office buildings where nicotine
addicts light up. At least those doorway dwellers don't have to breathe such
a concentration of secondhand smoke.

Paul G. Billings, an assistant vice president with the Washington,
D.C.-based American Lung Association, says it's hard to quantify how much
the inhalation of secondhand smoke in such airport lounges increases the
risk of cancer for those who visit the toxic little rooms for one last
cigarette before a flight. "It's just a horrible environment," he says.

Traveling is stressful, so I can see why smokers -- 25 percent of the adult
population in the United States, according to a Surgeon General's report --
would feel the need to light up between connections.

I feel sorry for smokers because they are consigned to these wretched
corners of airports, but as an occasional smoker, I would rather fall into a
mud puddle than visit an airport smoking lounge. Whether airports should
have such lounges or be entirely smoke-free is an issue that affects anyone
who trudges through the concourse.

Congress banned smoking on U.S. passenger flights of two hours or fewer in
1988. On June 4, 2000, smoking officially was prohibited on all scheduled
passenger flights of U.S. carriers and on flights to and from the United
States by foreign carriers.

"We sometimes forget how bad it was," says Billings, who thinks the airline
smoking ban helped galvanize public awareness about the dangers of
secondhand smoke.

I vividly recall a Balkan Bulgarian Airlines flight from New York to Sofia,
Bulgaria, eight years ago on which I was horrified to discover that most of
the passengers chain-smoked. It was awful. I got nauseated, and I didn't
care for Sofia, either.

The campaign to make airports smoke-free began more than a decade ago as the
various municipalities that oversee them began prohibiting smoking in public
buildings. In 1991, San Francisco International was among the first to
institute a no-smoking policy.

At first, the airport provided rooms for smokers, but these lasted only
about a year. Ron Wilson, a San Francisco International Airport spokesman,
says mothers took their kids into the lounges, and that just opening the
door was like smoking a pack. When the ventilation system filters were
removed for cleaning, they were "totally black," Wilson says. The airport
has gone to a total smoking ban.

At Pittsburgh International Airport's airside terminal, smoking is permitted
only in certain bars and restaurants that have designated smoking areas.
Smoking is not permitted in the landside terminal.

Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights opposes concourse smoking lounges as well
as restaurants and bars with smoking areas, even if they are equipped with
ventilation systems. Hallett says such systems remove odor and make smoking
areas more pleasant but don't address the health dangers of secondhand
smoke.

She says cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris is partly responsible for the
incorporation of such smoking areas inside airports.

Brendan McCormick, a spokesman for Philip Morris U.S.A., says the company
helped finance construction of smoking lounges in airports, including Las
Vegas' McCarran International in the mid-'90s, as part of its Options
program, which is designed to help owners of restaurants and bars (many of
them inside airports) deal with the growing body of regulations limiting
smoking in public places. McCormick says this largely entails offering
business owners advice on how to segregate smokers from nonsmokers using,
among other things, high-tech ventilation.

I know this will sound hypocritical because I'm a smoker, and I think people
should be able to smoke if they want to. But I also know that secondhand
smoke is a potent carcinogen. Smokers should never compromise the health of
people, especially children, who want nothing to do with cigarettes. So I
favor smoke-free airports, having landed at cigarette-butt-strewn airports
in Jordan and China and other places where smoking is tolerated.

If smoking lounges and concession areas can be built so they don't
jeopardize nonsmokers, I favor them too -- but not just for the sake of
nonsmokers. I'd like to see the people in those awful glassed-in rooms
released from the worst kind of airport hell.

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