Summer 05

Let’s Say ‘Humbug’ to Ambivalence to Public Smoking

To paraphrase Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Pam was dead, to begin with… This must be distinctly understood, or nothing good can come of the story I’m going to relate or the request I’m going to make.

Pam and I met out East. I was P.R. guy for a Hartford ad agency. She covered marketing for The Hartford Courant. I became her source. She became the source of my salvation – my best friend, lover, wife, stepmother to my sons and, eventually, business partner.

Pam also was a lifelong nonsmoker stricken with a smoker’s cancer. Despite the best efforts of Methodist Hospital, I.U. Cancer Center and M.D. Anderson physicians, Pam died on March 5 at age 49.

Theologians can debate the destiny of Pam’s soul, but in a battle we did not choose, her spirit helped persuade Indianapolis City-County Councilors and Mayor Bart Peterson to enact a smoking ban in most Marion County workplaces beginning next March.

Even in its watered-down form, the ban will save thousands from Pam’s fate. But the victory wasn’t easy. And it came too late for Pam, our boys and me.

As a newspaperwoman, Pam spent countless hours inhaling tobacco and its toxins. Back then, public hearings, school board meetings and interviews with pols and corporate honchos often occurred in smoke-filled rooms. What’s more, in college and on the job, Pam and her fellow scribes would finish the next-day’s edition and head for a bar to wind down.

When the cancer struck, Pam declined an invitation to report on her journey for IU’s “Sound Medicine.” (She was self-conscious about the slurred speech triggered by tongue surgery.)

But ever the journalist, she let me write Indianapolis Business Journal columns about our hopes and fears, our quest for a cure and our belief that snuffing out public smoking could save others.

Pam edited every one of those columns. When the topic was raw, she’d sit at our computer, tweaking my words through her tears.

So when Pam died, I carried on – attending council meetings, writing letters and, one night, telling Pam’s story at a public hearing.

Through it all, I watched alcohol and tobacco lobbyists and their puppet politicians debunk data, attack physicians’ credibility and pooh-pooh research showing overwhelming support for a ban.

In the end, opponents won enough exemptions to retain carcinogenic air in bars, bowling alleys and other havens. But most workplaces, including restaurants that serve people under 18, must go smoke-free.

Which brings me to my request.

While more than 2,000 cities, states and nations – including Italy and Ireland, California, Florida and New York City – are saving lives and preserving health through smoking bans, Hoosiers have mustered smoke-free ordinances in only three major cities: Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Bloomington.

We have thousands of influential medical professionals in a state intent on becoming a life-science powerhouse. If you and your colleagues would fight half as hard as Pam did through surgeries, chemotherapy and clinical trials, we could persuade state legislators to enact a strong, statewide ban instead of dillydallying one town at a time.

Please, combine your voice with those of your fellow health professionals. Lead the push for a statewide public smoking ban. With your initiative, we just might clear the air and say, ala Scrooge, “The spirits have done this life-saving deed in the political equivalent of one night.”