Chuck Magerl thinks supporters of Lawrence’s smoking ban are going overboard in their effort to protect bar and restaurant workers from the health risks posed by secondhand cigarette smoke.

Magerl, owner of downtown Lawrence’s Free State Brewing Co., 636 Mass., said an important fact had been lost in the controversy surrounding the Lawrence City Commission’s decision to ban smoking in virtually all indoor public places. An oft-cited reason for the ban is to protect the health of workers.

But the federal agency that oversees workplace safety issues, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has no regulations that say workers shouldn’t be exposed to secondhand smoke.

“What people are really saying in this debate is that we don’t want to live by OSHA’s rules,” Magerl said. “It seems like their battle should be with OSHA, not with the Red Lyon or some other bar in town.”

Ban supporters are quick to whack away at that argument, though. They say there is a simple reason OSHA doesn’t have secondhand smoke regulations: politics.

Dr. Steven Bruner, a Lawrence physician and supporter of the ban, said OSHA was controlled by Washington politicians, many of whom receive big campaign contributions from large tobacco companies. Bruner said it was clear OSHA understood the health dangers of secondhand smoke because it proposed tough regulations in 1994.

“They just got beaten down politically,” Bruner said. “OSHA did its job. The politicians just didn’t back them up.”

‘No safe level’

Supporters of Lawrence’s smoking ban said residents shouldn’t get caught up in the fact OSHA wasn’t clearly telling workers secondhand smoke is bad for their health.

Ryan Bauer, 23, front left, and Lindsay Gurbacki, 21, both Kansas University students, enjoy the clean air outside the Free State Brewing Co., 636 Mass., as other patrons smoke in the background. Free State owner Chuck Magerl contends that workplace safety is no argument for a smoking ban, because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has no regulations that workers shouldn't be exposed to secondhand smoke.

They say plenty of other organizations are. The Environmental Protection Agency is clear on the subject. It says scientific evidence shows secondhand smoke is a Class A carcinogen that causes lung cancer. In other words, nonsmokers can get lung cancer just from the smoke of a cigarette. The EPA estimates 3,000 nonsmokers each year die from lung cancer related to secondhand smoke exposure. It also estimates from 150,000 to 300,000 children younger than 18 months get bronchitis or pneumonia from breathing secondhand smoke.

The agency also has said that any level of secondhand smoke exposure can cause cancer, though the degree of risk is reduced as exposure decreases.

The EPA findings have been disputed by the tobacco industry and other smoking advocates for not being scientifically sound, but EPA officials stand firmly behind their validity.

The National Cancer Institute estimates that secondhand smoke causes another 35,000 deaths each year associated with heart disease. The EPA hasn’t yet made that finding but said the evidence clearly was “mounting.”

“There is no question that the scientific evidence on health risks of secondhand smoke is overwhelming,” said Judy Keller, executive director of the American Lung Association of Kansas and a Lawrence resident who supports the ban. “It is every major medical institution in the world that is saying this. And there’s no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.”

Quantity counts

That’s a point ban opponents aren’t willing to concede. Phil Bradley, executive director of the Lawrence-based Kansas Licensed Beverage Assn. and a ban opponent, said not taking into consideration the amount of secondhand smoke someone was exposed to was nonsense.

“With that logic, carbon monoxide is deadly, so we shouldn’t drive cars,” Bradley said. “It just all depends on how far you want to leap.”

Bradley and others hope city commissioners also will see it that way. Ban opponents have proposed a compromise that would allow smoking at businesses that agree to have random air-quality measurements taken to determine that nicotine levels don’t rise above a yet-to-be-decided level. City commissioners are scheduled to discuss the proposal Tuesday, though a majority of commissioners have said the compromise has little to no appeal to them.

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Bruner said there were good reasons the commission shouldn’t accept the compromise proposal. He said secondhand smoke was much different than other types of toxins that people might routinely be exposed to in small levels.

For example, ban opponents have sometimes mentioned that many people’s drinking water has some level of atrazine, a deadly toxin. They argue that’s an example of how a toxin isn’t necessarily harmful if kept below certain levels.

Bruner said research had shown cigarette smoke is different because unlike many other toxins, cigarette smoke is actually a combination of more than 50 toxic chemicals. Because the body is exposed to multiple toxins at once, it is difficult to say there’s any safe level of secondhand smoke to be inhaled, Bruner said.

“I think it is demonstrably true that dosage matters, but the problem with secondhand smoke is the dosage is so low that it is impossible to get a safe level, especially when you are in a room that has 15 or 20 people smoking in it,” he said.

Magerl thinks OSHA disagrees. He believes the agency thinks it is possible to control health effects of secondhand smoke by keeping it below certain levels in the workplace.

He contends actions the agency took in 2001 strongly indicated that was so. At that time, OSHA faced a lawsuit from the anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health. The group was seeking to force OSHA to make a decision on secondhand smoke regulations.

But in late 2001 Action on Smoking and Health dropped its lawsuit after officials said the group had learned OSHA was prepared to propose regulations that would allow secondhand smoke in the workplace.

In a news release announcing its decision to drop the lawsuit, Action on Smoking and Health said: “OSHA suggested that it might not be feasible to ban smoking in restaurants, and that developing some hypothetical measurement of tobacco smoke pollution might be a better remedy than prohibiting smoking.”

Once the lawsuit was dropped, OSHA never implemented any such regulations.

What does OSHA have to say about the incident? Very little. An OSHA spokesman, who refused to give his name for publication, referred all questions to a 2001 OSHA news release on the subject and a two-page written handout the agency has produced on the issue.

The documents state that OSHA stopped working on regulations after it became clear that local and state efforts were becoming effective in reducing exposure to secondhand smoke, and that the agency’s resources “are best directed at other issues.”