29
Oct

Smoking ban lights up tempers on the Flathead Reservation

   Posted by: admin   in Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Flathead Indian Reservation, Health

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Rick Wheeler, owner of The Club on the Flathead Reservation, says he would lose most of his customers if he enforced the state’s smoking ban in his bar. (Vince Devlin/Missoulian)

Rick Wheeler, owner of The Club on the Flathead Reservation, says he would lose most of his customers if he enforced the state’s smoking ban in his bar. (Vince Devlin/Missoulian)


Montana’s newly enacted smoking ban for bars has proved a boon to the state’s reservations, whose casinos and other businesses are exempt from the ban.

That’s raised the ire of non-tribal bar owners on the Flathead Reservation, who say the competition is killing them.

Rick Wheeler owns The Club in Ronan, on the western Montana reservation. His bar is just a block away from the Pheasant Lounge. That’s owned by Lori Peterson, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

People can still smoke in The Club. But not, technically, in the Pheasant Lounge. Missoulian reporter Vince Devlin explains that technicality here.

Basically, Wheeler is allowing his patrons to light up in defiance of the law.

Otherwise, Wheeler says, he’ll lose the estimated 90 percent of his customers who smoke and “that’s not right. This bar is my retirement – do they want to take that away form me, too? It’s racial discrimination.”

Both Wheeler and Peterson tell Devlin that bar owners on the reservation who enforce the smoke ban have seen their businesses drop by as much as $1,000.

Gwen Florio

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 11:01 am and is filed under Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Flathead Indian Reservation, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 comments so far

BJ Barto
 1 

My little girl and I have been going to the Casino at the Kwatuknic in Polsen for a long time for lunch because its been no smoking My best friend at Hotsprings has never smoked in her life but shes dying from COPD from second hand smoke from having to be in contact woth smoke to earn a living, What right about that????

October 29th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Thomas Laprade
 2 

Smoking bans the real health hazard

The bandwagon of local smoking bans now steamrolling across the nation has nothing to do with protecting people from the supposed threat of “second-hand” smoke.

Indeed, the bans are symptoms of a far more grievous threat, a cancer that has been spreading for decades and has now metastasized throughout the body politic, spreading even to the tiniest organs of local government. This cancer is the only real hazard involved – the cancer of unlimited government power.

The issue is not whether second-hand smoke is a real danger or is in fact a phantom menace, as a study published recently in the British Medical Journal indicates. The issue is: If it were harmful, what would be the proper reaction? Should anti-tobacco activists satisfy themselves with educating people about the potential danger and allowing them to make their own decisions, or should they seize the power of government and force people to make the “right” decision?

Supporters of local tobacco bans have made their choice. Rather than trying to protect people from an unwanted intrusion on their health, the bans are the unwanted intrusion.

Loudly billed as measures that only affect “public places,” they have actually targeted private places: restaurants, bars, nightclubs, shops and offices – places whose owners are free to set anti-smoking rules or whose customers are free to go elsewhere if they don’t like the smoke. Some local bans even harass smokers in places where their effect on others is negligible, such as outdoor public parks.

The decision to smoke, or to avoid “second-hand” smoke, is a question to be answered by each individual based on his own values and his own assessment of the risks. This is the same kind of decision free people make regarding every aspect of their lives: how much to spend or invest, whom to befriend or sleep with, whether to go to college or get a job, whether to get married or divorced, and so on.

All of these decisions involve risks; some have demonstrably harmful consequences; most are controversial and invite disapproval from the neighbours. But the individual must be free to make these decisions. He must be free because his life belongs to him, not to his neighbours, and only his own judgment can guide him through it.

Yet when it comes to smoking, this freedom is under attack. Smokers are a numerical minority, practising a habit considered annoying and unpleasant to the majority. So the majority has simply commandeered the power of government and used it to dictate their behaviour.

That is why these bans are far more threatening than the prospect of inhaling a few stray whiffs of tobacco while waiting for a table at your favourite restaurant. The anti-tobacco crusaders point in exaggerated alarm at those wisps of smoke while they unleash the unlimited intrusion of government into our lives. We do not elect officials to control and manipulate our behaviour.

October 30th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
harleyrider1978
 3 

So bj bartow,how long you been an active tobacco control blogger…that story your telling is about as old as noahs ark….toss out a emotional diatribe to garner support.well the facts just dont back you up…..

SECOND HAND SMOKE IS A JOKE. Ask the anti-tobacco folks to tell you what truly is in second hand smoke…when it burns from the coal its oxygenated and everything is burned and turned into water vapor………………thats right water……….you ever burned leaves in the fall…know how the heavy smoke bellows off…….thats the organic material releasing the moisture in the leaves the greener the leaves/organic material the more smoke thats made……thats why second hand smoke is classified as a class 3 irritant by osha and epa as of 2006……..after that time EPA decided to change the listing of shs as a carcinogen for political reasons…….because it contained a trace amount of 6 chemicals so small even sophisticated scientific equipment can hardly detect it ……..they didnt however use the normal dose makes the poison computation when they made this political decision. However osha still maintains shs/ets as an irritant only and maintains the dose makes the poison position…….as osha is in charge of indoor air quality its decisions are based on science not political agendas as epa’s is. We can see this is true after a federal judge threw out the epa’s study on shs as junk science……… Wednesday, March 12, 2008 British Medical Journal & WHO conclude secondhand smoke “health hazard” claims are greatly exaggerated The BMJ published report at:

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057

concludes that “The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer are considerably weaker than generally believed.” What makes this study so significant is that it took place over a 39 year period, and studied the results of non-smokers who lived with smokers…..

meaning these non-smokers were exposed to secondhand smoke up to 24 hours per day; 365 days per year for 39 years. And there was still no relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality. In light of the damage to business, jobs, and the economy from smoking bans the BMJ report should be revisited by lawmakers as a reference tool and justification to repeal the now unnecessary and very damaging smoking ban laws. Also significant is the World Health Organization (WHO) study:

Passive smoking doesn’t cause cancer-official By Victoria Macdonald, Health Correspondent ” The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: ‘There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood.’ ” And if lawmakers need additional real world data to further highlight the need to eliminate these onerous and arbitrary laws, air quality testing by Johns Hopkins University proves that secondhand smoke is up to 25,000 times SAFER than occupational (OSHA) workplace regulations.

The Chemistry of Secondary Smoke About 94% of secondary smoke is composed of water vapor and ordinary air with a slight excess of carbon dioxide. Another 3 % is carbon monoxide. The last 3 % contains the rest of the 4,000 or so chemicals supposedly to be found in smoke… but found, obviously, in very small quantities if at all.This is because most of the assumed chemicals have never actually been found in secondhand smoke. (1989 Report of the Surgeon General p. 80). Most of these chemicals can only be found in quantities measured in nanograms, picograms and femtograms. Many cannot even be detected in these amounts: their presence is simply theorized rather than measured. To bring those quantities into a real world perspective, take a saltshaker and shake out a few grains of salt. A single grain of that salt will weigh in the ballpark of 100 million picograms! (Allen Blackman. Chemistry Magazine 10/08/01). – (Excerpted from “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains” with permission of the author.)

The Myth of the Smoking Ban ‘Miracle’ Restrictions on smoking around the world are claimed to have had a dramatic effect on heart attack rates. It’s not true. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7451/

As for secondhand smoke in the air, OSHA has stated outright that: “Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)…It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded.” -Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec’y, OSHA, To Leroy J Pletten, PHD, July 8, 1997
-harleyrider1978

October 31st, 2009 at 4:52 am
Redroad
 4 

WHo cares!!! Leave the CSKT alone.

November 2nd, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Pamela Bond Coello
 5 

I just want to say that the non-Native man who chose to buy a bar on the Flathead Rez gets no sympathy from me. Too bad. Smoking or non-smoking establishments are not the concern. You probably do NOT own the land that the bar sits on. You may own the building…..I would think that the Flathead Nation owns the land and could evict you from it at anytime?? This was something you probably knew when you bought the bar. Tough luck if you do not get the same RIGHTS on land that dosn’t belong to you. It’s been that way for Native People far too long..It bites does’nt it?

November 16th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

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