A bill prohibiting smoking in a vehicle when a minor is present passed the Senate Committee on Health and Human Resources on Tuesday.
If Senate Bill 378 is signed into law, a person 18 or older would not be allowed to possess or smoke a lit tobacco product in a motor vehicle when a person 16 years or younger is present.
Violators of the possible new law could be charged with a misdemeanor and subject to a $25 fine if they’re already being pulled over for committing another code violation.
Sen. Tom Takubo, R-Kanawha and vice chair of the committee, spoke in favor of passage of the bill.
“It’s the most severe thing in terms of fear of any patient when they have a condition where they literally can’t breathe,” Takubo said. “And when you’re in a confined space, like a vehicle, these kids’ asthma flare tremendously.”
The bill was passed by the Senate Committee on Health and Human Resources and now heads to the full Senate for their consideration.
Senate Bill 514 was also considered by the committee. This bill creates the Lung Cancer Screening and Education Act, directing the West Virginia Department of Health to establish a public education outreach campaign to publicize lung cancer screening and education services.
According to counsel, the bill also creates a fund that would be annually funded by $100,000 from tobacco tax funding and may include money appropriated by the legislature or by the federal government. The bill also allows for public and private funding sources.
To qualify for a lung screening under Senate Bill 514, a patient’s income must be at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level. Also, the patient must be medically eligible, which includes, but is not limited to 50 to 80-year-olds who have at least a “20 pack year” smoking history and who are currently smoke, or have quit within the past 15 years.
The bill describes a “pack year” as smoking an average of one pack of cigarettes per day for one year. So based upon the language in the bill, a person would have a 20-pack-year history of smoking one pack a day for 20 years.
The fund must be the patient’s last resort and payment for the procedure can be adjusted yearly based upon inflation.
Takubo also spoke in favor of Senate Bill 514, citing statistics from 1950 to show just how far the United States has not come.
“When you go back to 1950, the overall survival for lung cancer was 8 percent,” Takubo said. “Speed all the way up to 2013 and the survival rate only went to 15 percent. It hadn’t even doubled – a 7 percent improvement in 63 years in advances in medicine.”
Takubo said the availability of lung screenings could save lives.
“If you’re in that high risk pool, just getting a low-dose CAT scan, you lay on the table, hold your breath, in and out,” Takubo said. “It’s that fast. No needle sticks, no contrast. That one test alone decreased the risk of dying by 20 percent.”
Takubo also said that about 8 percent of West Virginians qualify for a screening.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.
Hundreds of kids scurrying to buses are oblivious to a sign above them declaring Bourbon County High School “100 percent Tobacco Free.” But upstairs in the library, sophomore and anti-smoking advocate Jacob Steward unfurls a six-foot scroll with earth-toned papers trapped between clear sheets of laminate. He begins reading the anti-smoking slogans he’ll post around the school.
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Cyndi Steele, with Steward, has been an advocate since 1993, eight years before Jacob was born.
“E-cigs pose threat to health and turn kids into addicts and gives big tobacco your money,” he said. “E-cigs, neither water, vapor or harmless.”
Steward is well aware that while his high school campus is smoke free, his central Kentucky community is not. Many kids wander off to a nearby lot to smoke. And many of the Bourbon County businesses where teens work part-time still allow smoking, exposing kids and other workers to secondhand smoke.
In fact, about 60 percent of Kentucky communities do not have an ordinance requiring workplaces to ban smoking. Data from the Centers for Disease Control show Kentucky and West Virginia have the highest rates of teen smoking in the country.
With bright red hair, sharp blue eyes and braces, Jacob is the face of Students Making A Change in their Communities, or SMACK. He also reflects the region’s tobacco heritage. His family has long been in the tobacco growing business. Both his parents are long-time smokers, although his mom has switched to vaping.
He said kids are using nicotine to cope with anxiety and often progressing to other addicting drugs. Kids including his best friend from middle school, who got in busted for trading vaping supplies with high school kids after his mom went to prison. That boy and others, he said, seek out nicotine.
“They try to fill that void with a drug or something that takes their mind off it for a little while, off the things that are happening in their home life,” he said.
Tobacco Nation
Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio make up a third of what the anti-smoking group the Truth Initiative recently dubbed the “Tobacco Nation.” It’s a “country within a country” with high rates of smoking and tobacco-related diseases such as lung cancer and heart failure. People who live there tend to die young than in the rest of America. But Jacob and others are still working to solve the region’s original addiction crisis.
Ben Chandler, president and CEO of the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, said there is rightly a lot of discussion lately about the opioid crisis and the toll of heroin addiction in communities. But he said the region has two big addiction problems. The other?
“The nicotine in tobacco.”
Opioid overdoses claimed about 1,400 lives in Kentucky last year. According to the foundation, tobacco use and secondhand smoke kills nearly 9,000 Kentuckians each year and results in health care costs of $1.92 billion.
While Kentucky is perhaps the starkest example of tobacco’s toll, similar statistics are common around the The Ohio Valley region.CDC data show Kentucky and West Virginia have some of the highest adult and teen smoking rates in the country, and Ohio’s smoking rates are well above the national average.
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Ohio Valley ReSource
A coalition of business, health, and nonprofits aims to limit smoking in Kentucky, “the country’s cancer capital.”
Chandler leads Smoke-Free Tomorrow, a collection of organizations ranging from the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce to the council of churches. They launched their latest fight against smoking at a recent rally in Frankfort, where Chandler said there are some readily available tools to change those grim statistics.
“We have two very easy answers at hand,” he said. “Increase the cigarette tax by a dollar or more, and smoke-free laws all across this state.”
Price Point
Kentucky taxes cigarettes at 60 cents–among the ten lowest state taxes in the country. Chandler said the $1 hike is important. If the price doesn’t rise by at least that much, he said, the increased costs are offset by coupons and special deals by tobacco companies.
Ellen Hahn is the director of a tobacco-control advocacy group at the University of Kentucky called BREATHE, which stands for Bridging Research Efforts and Advocacy Toward Healthy Environments.
She said raising taxes has been proven to be an effective tool in both keeping people from starting to smoke and pushing people to quit. But only at the right price point.
“Make sure the price of tobacco is high enough to keep people who are price sensitive, like youth, pregnant women and low income populations, off of tobacco,” she said.
But while smoke free ordinances and tax increases have been successful across the country, here in the Ohio Valley region, she said, for every step forward like there is a step back.
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Many Bourbon County businesses where teens work part-time still allow smoking.
In West Virginia, for example, while about three-fourth of West Virginians live in places with a smoke-free workplace law, this summer the state slashed staff in its smoking prevention program, eliminating all but one of eight positions.
Ohio, she said, has had a statewide workplace ban on smoking for a decade but still has high rates of smoking and the diseases associated with tobacco use.
But, she said, she that change is happening because the issue is so complicated. “It there was an easy answer we would have found it by now.”
Tobacco Tradition
And then there is the issue of the tradition and historic importance of tobacco in the region. Even in Lexington, one of the first places in the state to enact smoking restrictions, visitors to Hahn’s BREATHE office are likely to walk through a smoke-filled sidewalk to get to her door.
That deeply rooted connection with tobacco is something Cyndi Steele knows well. Steele is the advisor to Jacob Stewart and the SMACK team. She’s been an advocate at the Bourbon County Health Department for 24 years and knows the heritage of smoking.
“It goes back to heritage,” she said. “It’s what put Christmas in the house, it’s what paid the farm bill, it put kids through college, it built the courthouse. That’s what I heard for years, is ‘that tobacco built the courthouse’.”
“But it certainly does not do that anymore,” she said, “and when you know better you do better.”
Changing Times
Jacob’s grandparents, whom he calls Nan and Pa, had 65 acres of tobacco in 2014. Now it’s just 10. Instead of growing a product that can harm people, they are now growing mums. Jacob is proud that the mums grown by his family are used in school fundraising projects in Bourbon County. That, he said, means it is a positive for both the family and the community.
Plus, he said, the perception of growing tobacco is changing.
“It is really just people realizing how dirty of a business tobacco is and people getting involved and understanding the risks of tobacco.”
He’s worked the fields himself and can rattle off each painstaking step of the process from soaking the tobacco stakes in bleach to carefully putting the seeds in the correct place for the most growth.
He’s not a fan.
“It’s hot and it’s sweaty and a lot of times it’s nasty,” he said.
Jacob said this is the year that Bourbon County will get a smoking ordinance. He’s got a winning strategy for convincing elected officials. One he’s perfected on his still-smoking mom.
Nagging.
“When are you going to quit. When are you going to quit,” he said. “After a certain point of pestering, they get tired of hearing it.”
At the legislature today, bad blood lingers in the Senate after yesterday’s action to move the charter schools bill to the floor. In the House, the Government Organization committee hears an earful from Democrats about the bill to roll back the prevailing wage law. And we’ll check in with the Our Children, Our Future campaign to see how their legislative priorities are doing at The Legislature Today.
At the legislature today, with three weeks left in this session, the Senate suspended the constitutional rule that bills be read on three separate days to quickly move legislation to the house. In the House, the Government Organization committee has rejected a bill that would give County Commissions the authority to pass smoking regulations. These stories and more legislative news coming up on The Legislature Today.
It was Tobacco Free Day at the Legislature, Friday. Coincidentally, the Government Organization Committee held a public hearing about smoking. Currently, a county board of public health passes smoking regulations. House Bill 2208, in its introduced version, would make it so only members of the county commission elected by voters have the power to regulate public smoking.
The bill has since changed and now county commissions could only decide if smoking will be allowed in casinos and video lottery businesses in the county. However, the introduced version stirred up a lot of emotions this morning as almost 30 citizens spoke to the committee.
Only one speaker expressed support for the bill.
Kenny Smith with the American Legion says putting restrictions on veterans who want to be able to go inside certain places and smoke isn’t fair.
“We are obligated to tell a man or a woman serving in the United States services under the age of twenty-one, he may not consume alcohol within our fraternal organizations; however this ship has sailed and it is accepted by this generation. We are now telling these same men and women they no longer enjoy the freedom of smoking within our walls as well,” Smith said, “To this extent, what freedoms will be taken next?”
Donna Gialluco with the Hancock County Health Department couldn’t understand why smoking was not deemed a public health issue in the introduced version of the bill.
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“Fifty-one years ago, the surgeon general’s report already sounded an alarm saying the dangers of smoking and how bad they are for us. Moving forward, secondhand smoke has also been a leading cause of cancer among non-smokers in particular,” Gialluco noted, “So again, I ask this question of you. How can a legislation define smoking as not a part of public health?”
After the public hearing ended, the Government Organization Committee began to discuss the bill.
Delegate Isaac Sponaugle, a Democrat from Pendleton County, was the first one to point out that members were no longer looking at the introduced version of the bill but instead at a committee substitute.
The committee substitute no longer restricts smoking regulations to only the county commission, but instead makes it so the commission only has authority over regulations at casinos and video lottery sites. The smoking regulations set down already by each county’s public health board would remain the same as before.
Delegate Sponaugle was curious if the county commission even wanted the authority of regulating public smoking at these sites.
Jack Woodrum with the Summers County Commission spoke on behalf of the commission and says there are language issues with the bill that concern him.
The committee continued to discuss the bill questioning counsel and Woodrum on the issues of liability in the current language, of safety, and of health.
But in the end, House Bill 2208 allowing county commissioners to decide if smoking would be permitted at casinos and video lottery establishments was rejected.
