Group wants law to protect non-smokers

The Great American Smokeout is not until Thursday, but area residents have already joined with Tobacco Prevention of Raleigh to show that smoking areas in restaurants cause a decreased air quality level.

Two teams of observers visited nine area restaurants - both smoke free and with smoking areas - on Sept. 27 and recently received the results of their tests, said Gary Miner, director of the Tobacco Awareness Program.

Smoke-free restaurants averaged a 2.9 percent air quality index which, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, doesn't warrant any health advisories.

Restaurants with designated smoking areas, however, averaged a 55.43 percent rating on the index, which is designated as unhealthy for sensitive groups.

"People with heart or lung disease, older adults and children should reduce prolonged or heavy exertion," reads the health advisory connected to the rating. "Everyone else should reduce prolonged or heavy exertion."

The names of the restaurants are not being released.

"What we're doing is just gathering data. We don't want any restaurants to be named of where we go, or any places, because ... we're just monitoring the air and comparing it to a non-smoking place and a smoking place," said Philisa Parker, Onslow County's Tobacco Prevention representative.

On the day of their visits, the two teams split up. One team visited two smoke-free and two smoking restaurants while the other went to three smoking and two smoke-free restaurants.

Each team carried a personal aerosol monitor, a real-time laser photometer with a built-in sampling pump that measures airborne particle mass-concentration.

The groups made notes of the time they left their meeting point and the time they arrived at, and left, each restaurant, which allowed Tobacco Prevention to return data labeled with times to compare the restaurants.

"The machine has a tube in it, and it's very sensitive, so it picked up the smoke," Miner said, explaining that at smoke-free restaurants it picked up employees smoking outside.

The point of the research, Miner said, was not to label restaurants as smoke-filled but to show that designated smoking areas don't work.

"There's no way you can justify a smoking area and a non-smoking area. It's just like a swimming pool with a peeing area and a non-peeing area," he said

The observation, Miner said, began slightly before 5 p.m. and ended before 9 p.m.

"If we would have stayed later we would have gone into here," Miner said, pointing at the index's unhealthy rating. "But we all got sick ... We all stunk of tobacco."

While smokers have their rights, Miner said, he wishes there was a law to protect non-smokers.

"We're trying to prove that there needs to be a law to protect the employees, to protect the patrons," he said. "Right now there's nothing."

With the Great American Smokeout only days away, Miner said, the researchers' release date had good timing.

"The Great American Smokeout is a campaign to get everybody to stop smoking for one day," he said. "If they can do it for one day, they can do it for two days. If they can do it for two days, they can do it for three days - the snowball effect."

Contact Jacksonville/Onslow County reporter Amanda Hickey at 910-219-8461.