Now this is a milestone worth noting: According to Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, for the first time in U.S. history, half of us now work in cities and states where there are smoking bans in offices, restaurants and/or bars.
I’ll drink to that.
I can’t speak for the evolution of smoking practices in IT departments – at least one of our guys is still hooked — but it’s difficult to overstate what has happened in American workplaces and public places over the 30 years since Berkeley, Calif., got all of this started.
Newsrooms didn’t exactly embrace the workplace antismoking movement, as whatever liberal tendencies may lurk there were long kept at bay by journalism’s time-honored addiction to addictive personalities. A lifelong non-smoker myself, I still cannot purge from my sensory memory the stench – no, make that the taste – of starting my newspaper workday in the early ‘80s at the ungodly hour of 4 a.m. inside a toxic plume generated by chain-smoking colleagues to my left and right. Coffee, my own vice, provided scant relief.
Today I rarely even see the butt-fiends huddled outside office buildings, as was a much more common sight only a decade ago.
The movement for smoke-free air has gone from being a California oddity to the nationwide norm,” said Bronson Frick, the nonsmokers’ rights group’s associate director. “We think 100 percent of Americans will live in smoke-free jurisdictions within a few years.”
Might be a few more than a few, but here’s betting that in adulthood my 5-year-old children look back on even this relatively smoke-free era as only the beginning of the end.
Of course, the signs of continued progress are everywhere. Why even the fellows who play in our monthly poker game (won $50 last night, thank-you) have ditched their beloved cigars. And the change didn’t take any legislative action at all, by the way, just me having had a heart attack three years ago.
Nothing says friendship like wanting to spare a fellow his second heart attack.
