EDITORIAL
Just when we thought we had heard every conceivable argument from the vaguely legitimate to the totally ludicrous against the proposed statewide ban on smoking in public places, the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of North Jersey and Southern New Jersey has served up a proverbial gutter ball.
When the members of the New Jersey Legislature next arrive at their offices in Trenton, they will find 120 bowling shoes awaiting them one for each lawmaker. This is meant to symbolize the proprietors’ insistence that their establishments be exempt from the proposed smoking ban.
How, you might ask, does one bowling shoe deliver this symbolic message? Well, the line of reasoning a three-step approach that’s as fanciful as a novice bowling a 300 game goes something like this:
Bowling shoes have a special leather sole designed to give bowlers the optimum footing on the polished wood of an alley. These shoes have a tendency to slip easily on a wet surface. That’s step one.
Here’s step two: If bowling alleys are subject to the proposed smoking ban, bowlers who want to smoke will be forced to go outside. And if they do so on a rainy day, their shoes will get wet.
Are you with us so far? Great. Now comes the third and final step. When bowlers who go outside to smoke on rainy days come back inside with their wet, leather-soled shoes, they will be more likely to lose their footing. This, in turn, will increase the risk of injury. Which, as everyone knows, will force bowling alley owners to pay higher insurance premiums which they’ll have no choice but to pass along to their customers. And if there’s one thing bowling alley owners and their customers simply can’t afford, it’s you’ll pardon the expression a strike right in their pocket.
You’ve got to hand it to these guys. They’ve managed to make groups like restaurant and bar owners, casinos, tobacco companies and other outspoken opponents of the smoking ban come across as downright selfish. While these other groups generally argue that their businesses will be hurt by a smoking ban a claim that seems not to be substantiated by the experience in other jurisdictions, like New York and California, where such a ban is in effect the bowling proprietors just want to save their customers the unnecessary expense of subsidizing higher insurance premiums. It almost sounds reasonable by comparison.
Until you stop to think about what kind of costs we’re talking about here. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the bowling proprietors are right; insurance companies will hike their premiums because of the increased risk of bowlers being injured due to wet shoes. How much are these increased premiums likely to add up to compared to the cost of treating just one or two additional lung-cancer patients for one day in an emergency room, or a handful or additional heart-attack and stroke victims in an intensive care unit? How about compared to the cost of treating the untold number of victims of secondhand smoke? Or the cost of paying the Medicare and Medicaid subsidies to provide treatment to the uninsured, who now account for one out of every seven Americans?Here’s a suggestion for our legislators. As you ponder the message sent to you in the form of a bowling shoe, ask a physician in your district to send you an X-ray of a lung ravaged by cancer, or a heart damaged by scar tissue, or a carotid artery constricted by a blockage. Compare these images to that bowling shoe, and then decide which one makes a more persuasive argument regarding smoking in public places. Then, pass the ban. Not only is it long overdue, but now the arguments against it are reaching the point of sheer absurdity.