There goes the Neigborhood! GREELEY, CO (KUNC) -
Every doctor knows that smoking isn't good for your health. Hospitals in the Denver area are now trying to see how far they can go to protect their patients and workers which may just be across the street. KUNC commentator Dr. Marc Ringel has more.

When I was a kid stewardesses (that's what we used to call flight attendants) actually handed out little four-packs of cigarettes to adult passengers. Smokers were confined to the rows in the aft section of the aircraft. This was considered sufficient protection from secondhand smoke (a term not in common usage then) for the non-smokers who occupied the forward sections of a hermetically sealed cabin.


Imagine today how it would feel to sit down in an airplane and have the passenger behind you light up. Or to be in a college lecture hall and watch the student sitting at the next desk puff on a cigarette. That's how it was during my post-high school scholastic career, including in medical school. When I started doing rotations in the hospital we smoked in the doctors' lounge, in the cafeteria, and in the lobby. Patients smoked in their rooms too.


Thanks to a thoughtful, persistent, and very effective public anti-smoking campaign, today exposing people to others' tobacco smoke is far from the norm. It's considered downright rude, not to mention unhealthy and unfair, to make someone else inhale the smoke that you add to your immediate atmosphere.
On a trip to Nebraska last summer I ate one evening at a restaurant that had a smoking section. Just seeing those Cornhuskers leaning over restaurant tables with cigarettes in their hands was actually a bit shocking to the eyes of this Coloradan who, thanks to enlightened legislation in my home state, hadn't been subjected to the sight (and smell) of smokers in eating and drinking establishments for a couple of years.


An ordinance that extends smoking bans to the very edges of all hospital campuses in the city has just passed first reading by the Denver City Council. If this bill does become law you won't anymore see smokers hovering around ashtrays placed ten yards or so from hospital doorways. These people will have to choose between not smoking or walking across the street to feed their habit.


I don't really buy the argument that banning tobacco altogether from hospital grounds would make a significant dent in the level of secondary tobacco smoke exposure to visitors at these institutions. Thanks to the current level of smoking restrictions, there is already so little smoke to be breathed on hospital grounds that further prohibitions will accomplish very little.


Very little, that is in terms of secondhand smoke exposure. But still worth doing for the message that such a ban will send. Each time the size of the territory in which smoking is unwelcome gets bigger, the better everyone, especially smokers, gets the message that smoking is not normal, cool, nor even convenient, helping more addicts to give up their tobacco habit.


The usual militant smokers and tobacco industry lobbyists are campaigning against this extension of the tobacco ban on Denver hospital campuses. They have been joined by a third group, property owners from the blocks around hospitals, who are squawking loudly over the vision of their neighborhoods packed with lurking smokers, just like the kids we labeled hoodlums for hanging around and smoking at the drugstore across the street from my high school.


I'm reminded of an old joke about how New York City solved their pigeon problem. They dropped three hundred tons of bread crumbs on New Jersey. The City Council could collaborate with Denver hospitals to solve not only the neighborhood smoking problem, but the whole state's nicotine issues if they could just convince the tobacco companies to give away four-packs of cigarettes right across the border in Nebraska.


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