Passage of Smoking Ban Gets In Tobacco Country's Eyes

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, Va. -- At the Chesterfield Diner south of Richmond, just about everything comes with a side of smoke.

Ashtrays line the speckled green counter, and a hazy glow emanates from the fluorescent lights overhead. The smell of cigarettes permeates the small roadside restaurant, despite the Smokeeter air purifier whirring in the corner. Those who don't like it "can sit over yonder in the corner and play with their feet," Carol Rolfe, the restaurant's owner, said one recent evening.

Rolfe, a smoker since she worked at the nearby Philip Morris plant in the 1960s, sat puffing on a Marlboro and spitting fire about legislation passed yesterday by the Virginia Senate to ban smoking in restaurants and other public places.

Similar bills have been introduced unsuccessfully over the years. But this year, Democrats, including Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, have made it a key part of their agenda. In part, they say smoking is an occupational hazard for waiters and bartenders, who studies show suffer from a higher incidence of smoke-related illnesses.

Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax), whose party controls the chamber for the first time in a decade, made it clear that the smoking bills would not go down without a fight.

"People's ability and rights to smoke, their civil rights stop at my nose," he barked to a packed audience at a meeting last week. "They don't have a right to intrude on my space, and the argument of, 'Well then, go elsewhere,' isn't going to cut it this time."

In Northern Virginia, most restaurants have banned smoking in response to customer pressure, according to the Virginia Hospitality and Travel Association, which opposes banning smoking in restaurants.

In Fairfax County, almost 95 percent of restaurants surveyed said they were completely smoke-free, according to the association. The analysis was based on Virginia Department of Health data, a spokesman said. In Chesterfield County, by contrast, about 43 percent of restaurants said they have banned smoking.

To many in Virginia's tobacco regions, at stake is nothing less than their economy and heritage.

Many remember the harvest as an exciting time, when streets bustled with trucks and every sector of business flourished, said Frank Malone, executive director of the Tobacco Farming History Museum in Mecklenburg County, on the North Carolina border.

The smell of curing tobacco wafted through the streets, he said.

"Smelled like money," he said. "Let's face it, tobacco has paid a lot of bills and touched a lot of lives in southern Virginia. It built the community, and it created jobs for people. You learn not to preach too hard against what makes you money."

Although tobacco is not the gold mine it once was, it remains integral to the state's economy. More than 17,000 acres were dedicated to the crop in 2005, according to the Virginia Farm Bureau, and the state grows more than 40 million pounds of tobacco each year.

Cigarette-maker Philip Morris USA, which is based in Richmond, is one of the state's 50 largest employers, with 5,800 workers and 5,600 retirees in Virginia. The company contributed about $660 million to the state's economy through payroll and taxes in 2006, a spokesman said.

Proponents of the ban say the rest of Virginia is changing, too, albeit slowly, in response to overwhelming scientific evidence and public education programs that seem to be making headway. The state Department of Health estimates that 1,700 Virginians die each year from secondhand smoke.

"When I first began talking about the dangers of smoking in public, I would have some people come up to me afterward and say, 'You don't really think all that stuff is true, do you?' " said Kevin Cooper, a pulmonary disease specialist and a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

"They would say, 'This can't be true because tobacco made me rich. Because it supported my family. Because it put my kids through college,' " he said. "I don't see that anymore. Now I see a begrudging acceptance of the health effects of smoking."

The argument that nonsmoking restaurants are healthier for workers doesn't hold water for Rolfe.

"The employees here smoke, every one of them, down to the janitor. And you can ask me yourself!" Rolfe, 64, said, letting out a whoop of laughter that dissolved into a raspy cough.

On a recent Friday night, George and Sandy Elliott slipped in the door of the Chesterfield Diner just before closing to get a dish of spoon bread, a house specialty. Sandy Elliott, 46, lit a cigarette as her husband, a longtime smoker who quit after a heart attack, spoke bitterly about what he considers a slow erosion of rights.

"We're trying to free people in other countries while we become slaves in our own," said George Elliott, 65.

He and Rolfe rattled off names of relatives whose livelihoods depended on the tobacco industry: a brother, a cousin, an uncle. George Elliott works for a company that hauls equipment for Philip Morris, whose headquarters is a few miles up Interstate 95.

In Northern Virginia, "it doesn't mean a lot to them because they're all from other countries," said Sandy Elliott. "They don't raise tobacco, and they all have government jobs."