[Intl-tobacco] Italy's Antitobacco Campaign Battles Culture of Individualism (fwd)

[Robert Weissman]

Italy's Antitobacco Campaign Battles Culture of Individualism
by DEBORAH BALL / Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
 deborah.ball@wsj.com1
Source: The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, Thursday, 8/17/00

MILAN -- When Anna Maria Bellantoni came home from boarding school the
Christmas after she turned 17, her parents, both heavy smokers, made their
usual offering of cigarettes to the family members gathered in their Milan
home for the holidays. Ms. Bellantoni, who had secretly started smoking
two years earlier, decided to take the plunge and ask for one as well. To
her surprise, her parents gave her an approving look as they handed her a
cigarette.

"They looked at me as if I were more important then, as if I'd made some
sort of transition to adulthood," recalls Ms. Bellantoni, who quit after
smoking heavily for 15 years and is now 50 years old. She now shows little
mercy for her former comrades, decrying what she sees as an arrogant
attitude among many smokers in Italy.

"When they ask you if they can smoke, what they really expect to hear is
yes,"  she says. "But I ask them to move away from me when they light up."

In the land where asking for a light is a basic tool of seduction and
where doctors are still seen smoking in hospitals, the plight of
nonsmokers in Italy has long seemed a dismal one. But attitudes are
shifting, with Italian nonsmokers drawing inspiration from America's
cigarette wars and emboldened by a new health minister whose tough
antismoking line could make him Italy's own version of former U.S. Surgeon
General C. Everett Koop.

Unenforced Rules

While antismoking campaigns have become the norm in many European
countries, Italy -- the continent's largest producer of tobacco -- has
done remarkably little to break its citizens of the deadly habit. While
Italians smoke only slightly more than the European average, the culture
has long favored smokers, differing from countries such as Sweden, where
determined antismoking campaigns have helped nonsmokers assert their
rights and have cut the percentage of adults who smoke to less than 20%
from about 35% in 1980.

In Italy, a 1975 law banning smoking in schools, public administration
buildings and airports is flagrantly ignored and rarely enforced. "As long
as I got the cops in the building to help me enforce the ban, I could
manage it,"  recounts Benito Marino, who is in charge of managing Milan's
hulking justice building and is responsible for slapping the 4,000 lira
($1.83, 2 euro) fine on perpetrators. Despite a zeal inspired by his deep
aversion to tobacco, Mr.  Marino levied just 185 fines in two years,
before giving up when the police stopped assisting him and colleagues
refused to hand over the documents needed to fill out the tickets.

Other examples of Italy's pro-cigarette culture abound. Taxi drivers often
huff when asked to obey the ban on smoking in their own cabs. Celebrities
and politicians routinely smoke during television interviews, with one
minister even chomping on his ever-present cigar throughout the nationally
broadcast swearing-in ceremony of the last government.

Signs of Progress

Over the past several years, the antismoking lobby has finally managed to
assert itself, while an intolerance toward smokers is steadily spreading.
The underlying push comes from the fact that Italians are kicking the
habit in increasing numbers, with smokers now representing about 25% of
the population, down from 35% in 1980. Sales of Nicorette gum and its
sister nicotine-replacement products have risen 35% in each of the past
two years, while stop-smoking centers (some offering questionable remedies
such as herbal potions) are mushrooming.

As a result, nonsmokers are becoming more demanding in their desire for a
butt-free environment, with more and more Italians finding the courage to
say no when smokers ask whether they can light up. In the wake of legal
action, unions are standing up for workers fed up with spending eight
hours a day exposed to their colleagues' habit. Some restaurants are
finding it profitable to offer nonsmoking areas, while a few major hotels
are starting to provide smoke-free rooms for the first time. (Last year's
high-profile $35 million -- 38.3 million euros -- renovation of Rome's St.
Regis Grand hotel included the installation of nonsmoking rooms.)

"I'd spent a lot of time in the U.S., and when I came back to Italy, I
thought there would be demand here as well for a nonsmoking section," says
Fabio Bongianni, the owner of T-Bone, a popular American-style steakhouse
near the Spanish Steps in central Rome. "We saw pretty quickly that our
customers liked it."

Limits Loom

Umberto Veronesi, Italy's new health minister (above), proposed fines up
to $3,000 for those who fail to enforce smoking bans.

The biggest crack in the wall, however, could come with last month's
legislative proposal from Umberto Veronesi, the new health minister, who
is also one of the country's foremost oncologists. The law would be the
toughest Italy has seen, extending the smoking ban to virtually all closed
areas, forcing restaurants to set up nonsmoking areas and even obliging
prisons to offer inmates smoke-free cells. And to overcome Italians'
infamous aversion to any restrictions on their personal behavior, the new
law includes stiff fines -- up to $3,000 -- for those who fail to enforce
the bans.

However, the Veronesi proposal has raised the hackles of a number of
powerful lobbies, reflecting the difficulty the antitobacco campaign will
face. Italy's 230,000 cafes and restaurants started howling immediately,
claiming they would have to spend a collective 3.5 trillion lire to revamp
ventilation systems and create nonsmoking areas. They and other targets of
the ban also protest that they have no interest in acting as vigilantes or
slapping their own clients with fines under the threat of being fined
themselves.

Indeed, some already see the cultural limits to the antismoking campaign
in Italy. For Italy differs from the U.S. in that Italians lack the
American zeal to sanction the personal behavior of their friends and
neighbors, instead harboring a deep-rooted tolerance for vices such as
littering and madcap parking.

"In the U.S., when they take up a cause, everyone goes along," says Ugo
Martinet, a right-wing deputy who is infamous in the Parliament for the 60
cigarettes he consumes daily. "But Italy is a free country," he adds as he
fingers a cigarette. "We leave these things to people's free choice."

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Key Points of Proposed Italian Antismoking Bill

* Ban smoking in workplaces, including ones not open to the public; the
ban applies to railway stations, airports, hospitals and schools.

* Require bars, restaurants and clubs to set up non-smoking areas or
provide adequate ventilation systems.

* Require prisons to establish smoke-free cells.

* Increase fines for smoking in many public places, setting a range of
50,000 lire to 300,000 lire, up from the current 1,000 lire to 10,000
lire.

* Establish fines of up to six million lire for those who fail to enforce
the ban, such as restaurant owners.


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