Big Tobacco has been a slow-moving target for years now, at least since 1994 when Christopher Buckley ripped the industry in his satirical novel Thank You for Smoking, a stab at the tobacco spin machine that opened last week as a full-length film. But in Tennessee, where tobacco was grown in 70 of 95 counties last year, the industry is still a powerful force, especially in the smoke-filled lobby of the Legislative Plaza, where political decisions are often made among small groups of legislators huddled together. Even so, there are signs that, if the empire isn’t crumbling, it certainly isn’t what it used to be. Anti-smoking advocates, who canvassed the capitol this week, have seen more tobacco control legislation filed this year than any other. An increase in the state’s tobacco tax, the third lowest in the nation, appears to be inevitable, somewhere between 20 and 70 cents a pack. And city governments, representing 58 percent of the state’s population, have signed a resolution asking legislators to overturn a decades-old law forbidding cities to enact their own measures against smoking in public places, like grocery stores and restaurants. That legislation—pernicious in the eyes of anti-smoking groups because of the stealthy way it was passed—might even see some tweaking by the end of this General Assembly session. A Senate committee, during a debate that invoked the names and spirit of the Civil Rights era, badgered a Tennessee Restaurant Association lobbyist into working out a compromise bill that would offer restaurants a choice: either prohibit children or prohibit smoking. And though it’s easy to imagine the bill dying in committee—the state House is more tobacco-friendly than the Republican-controlled Senate —it’s less certain that the debate leading to the bill would even have occurred a few years ago. The recent discussion only got going when a group of high school students introduced legislation as part of a political-learning opportunity offered by Rep. Jim Hackworth of Anderson County, a suburban, semi-rural area west of Knoxville where farmers grow tobacco in such small amounts it doesn’t register on USDA state totals. One of the students, Jacob Feuer, took the lead in the debate, mainly against Senate Majority Leader Ron Ramsey, a Blountsville Republican who said he was challenging Feuer as a devil’s advocate. “I just want to see how good you are,” Ramsey said. Turns out Feuer was pretty good. He compared smoke-free sections in restaurants to urine-free zones in swimming pools—a standard line of anti-smoking pundits that still brought a round of laughter from the Senate audience. Feuer called the five-foot barrier between the zones inadequate and emphasized that children and restaurant workers needed to be protected from second-hand smoke. Feuer seemed to win points by stressing children over property rights. When Ramsey said it should be restaurateurs’ decision whether to allow smoking in their buildings, Feuer responded that legislators require car passengers to wear seat belts even thought the vehicles are privately owned. When Ramsey said drivers don’t have a choice to ride down public roads, Feuer responded that children have little say in where they dine. “Parents should be able to choose where they take a child,” said Ramsey, before backtracking. “But I don’t agree with that.” After Feuer stepped down, the anti-tobacco rhetoric heated up. First, Sen. Jeff Miller of Cleveland, a former friend of the tobacco industry, chastised restaurant owners for being paranoid about losing business. “In the last year, I have had the occasion to travel to New York City and Florida, which have smoke-free restaurants and bars,” he said. “I cannot tell you what a difference it makes. It is huge.” He then told the students he appreciated their efforts and that a smoke-free Tennessee was inevitable, and he vowed to vote for every smoke-free bill presented to him before he retires from the Senate at the end of this year. The committee’s chair, Sen. Steve Cohen, a Memphis attorney who has opposed Big Tobacco for years, then reminded senators that tobacco-friendly places as close as Kentucky and as far away as Ireland have enacted smoke-free laws with much upside and no downside. He reminded everyone that the Senate room where they were meeting was dedicated to Ben Longley, a longtime smoker who died of lung cancer. Before he died, Longley returned to the Assembly to lobby against smoking. “I would hope as people come in this room, they would remember why he died,” Cohen said. Cohen received one of the loudest laughs when he called up all the opponents of the students’ bill. Seeing only Dan Haskell of the Tennessee Restaurant Association walk to the podium, Cohen mocked the absence of other special interests. “No tobacco lobbyists here or are they afraid to come up? They’re all attached to oxygen machines, I guess.” And it was Cohen who upped the ante as Haskell wondered aloud why restaurants—as opposed to hardware stores or lawyers’ offices—were being targeted for legislation. “I’ll tell you why,” Cohen interrupted. “Because when you eat, you want to put something good in your mouth, and for people like me who can’t stand the smell of cigarette smoke, it ruins your meal. I can’t enjoy a meal where there’s smoking. I can go to a hardware store and it doesn’t bother my buying a hammer. But when I eat, I don’t want to have my taste buds or my nose fouled by the smell of tobacco.” He then pointed out that the property rights often championed by restaurant owners to allow smoking were also used by segregationists like Lester Maddox, the former Georgia governor who closed his restaurant rather than permit blacks to eat there. “With all due respect to your argument, Lester Maddox held up an ax and said black people can’t come into my restaurant. And the Supreme Court said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ People have a right to public accommodation and equal access. This one is coming. These students are right and y’all need to get on the right side of things.” As he was finishing his comments, Cohen personally attacked Haskell for lobbying against smoke-free restaurants. “Obviously you like smoke but most people don’t,” the senator said. The comment seemed to catch Haskell off guard, leaving him stumbling for words and admitting he was in an odd position to defend the Restaurant Association. “I’m personally very troubled by eating with people who are smoking,” Haskell said. In the end, the committee agreed to allow Haskell to help write a compromise bill with the committee’s attorney, due this week, which would force restaurants either to go smoke-free and allow children, or restrict children under the age of 18 and allow smoking. “I think this is a grand opportunity for the restaurants of Tennessee to lead the way,” Miller said. Cohen concluded the issue with a comment worthy of Thank You for Smoking. Talking to Haskell, the restaurant lobbyist, Cohen warned him to avoid certain parts of the Legislative Plaza while writing the compromise. “Don’t go in the legislative cafeteria,” he said, “because they smoke in there. Give you an idea where your bill might end up."
