Imagine it’s a Thursday night and all of your friends are out on the town while you’re stuck at home, finishing up your last bit of schoolwork before the weekend begins. They call you and beckon you to come out and have a few beers. The collective agreement is that Monday’s is the place to be and you’re to meet them there at 11:00. So you head out, but when you get to the bar you witness a strange and disturbing phenomenon: Everyone inside Monday’s is sloshing around in two inches of some strange fluid on the floor that not only looks, but also smells, exactly like urine. You turn to the bouncer at the entrance and say, “What the hell is on the floor in there?” He responds agitatedly, “It’s urine.” “Urine?” you say in disbelief. “What? That’s disgusting.” The bouncer turns and looks you directly in the eye and says, “Listen you wiseass hippie, the owner decided he’s losing too much money running and maintaining restrooms for his patrons. All that time he spent paying his employees to clean up bathrooms was significantly hurting his profit margin, so he got rid of ’em. And by the way, our owner has the right to run his business any way he wants. You want a bar with a bathroom, go somewhere else!” In utter disbelief, you leave the bar. But you say to yourself that you’d still like to have a beer and watch the end of the game, so you decide to stop into Brats. Wouldn’t you know it, though, Brats has urine and feces floating all over its floors too, and nearly all of its patrons have the same half-disgusted look on their faces that you saw from the people inside Monday’s. It’s the same story in Brothers, the Plaza, the Irish Pub and every other bar you go to, until finally… you wake up. It was all a dream. Fortunately, you wake up to a much more rational and reasonable world. You wake up in Wisconsin, where state statute 254.61 mandates all restaurants and bars provide public restrooms in order to protect the health of its citizens. You wake up in the real world, where there is a fundamental obligation on the part of the government to regulate private business in order to maintain a certain public health standard. Earlier this week, Senate President Fred Risser, D-Madison, attempted to fulfill this governing obligation by introducing a bill that would ban smoking from all workplaces statewide, including restaurants and bars. And just as a statewide mandate for restaurants and bars to provide public restrooms protects Wisconsinites from the health hazards of sloshing around in human excrement, a statewide ban on smoking in the workplace would protect the citizenry from the very serious public health concern of secondhand smoke. According to a 2006 U.S. Surgeon General’s report, secondhand nonsmokers have a 25 percent increased risk of heart disease and at least a 30 percent increased risk of getting lung cancer when regularly exposed to tobacco smoke. In the report, then-Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona said, “Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance. It is a health hazard that can lead to disease and premature death in children and nonsmoking adults.” Further, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, secondhand smoke kills more than 800 people per year in Wisconsin, a figure slightly higher than that of traffic accidents. Likewise, secondhand smoke is the third-leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. and kills an estimated 53,000 Americans every year, according to Smoke Free Wisconsin. It is also worth noting that many outside the Wisconsin Legislature are increasingly recognizing the public health risks induced by secondhand smoke, and are taking action with statewide smoking bans. If Wisconsin adopts Mr. Risser’s proposed legislation, it will become the 23rd state in the country to enact a statewide smoking ban that includes bars and restaurants. However, the idea has met some opposition, primarily from the Tavern League and those concerned with a workplace ban that includes bars because of the “potential for economic losses.” In fact, the market reality is that a statewide ban would actually level the economic playing field for bars that currently fall within one of the 33 Wisconsin municipalities that have smoke-free ordinances in all workplaces, including bars. As the logic follows, municipalities that have enacted these ordinances run the risk of losing business to neighboring municipalities that do not have smoke-free ordinances. However, with a ban that encompasses all of Wisconsin, and with Minnesota and Illinois recently passing statewide bans, there is virtually no risk of Wisconsin bars suffering economic losses from potential patrons crossing the border — whether it is a state or municipal border — in order to be able to smoke inside a bar. Moreover, it should be noted that, according to a 2007 University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health study, less than 20 percent of Wisconsinites are smokers — meaning there is a potential for economic gain for taverns who could gain business from a potential population of over 80 percent who are disenfranchised nonsmokers, as opposed to the potential of losing business from less than 20 percent of the population who would not be able to smoke indoors in the aftermath of a statewide ban. What’s more is that both the state and private insurers stand to gain from decreased medical costs as a result of less exposure to secondhand smoke. Unfortunately, however, despite the need for a public standard of health and the potential for economic gain statewide, there prevails among some a tired, black-and-white, extreme-libertarian viewpoint that rejects any regulation on business. This school of thought says that any potential customer can clearly see when a bar is smoke-filled and therefore can simply go to another bar if he or she is concerned about the health risks of secondhand smoke. Likewise, the same logic is to be applied to bar employees who are regularly exposed to secondhand smoke at their place of work. No one is forced to work in a bar, and therefore, no one is forced to be exposed to secondhand smoke. Furthermore, if bars stood to gain economically from a ban on smoking, market principles would dictate that more bars across the state would become smoke-free at their own discretion to appease consumer desires and the majority of the bar-going population. This phenomenon has not occurred. Yet, various public opinion polls seem to be at odds with said market principles and the aforementioned public philosophy — often showing wide support for statewide smoking ban. For example, a statewide poll conducted earlier this year by the Mellman Group and Public Opinion Strategies found that 64 percent of state occupants support a law making workplaces, including restaurants and bars, completely smoke-free. What could account for this disparity? Quite simply, it is a logical failure that assumes that if a cost-benefit analysis results in a certain action, then the costs considered therein are therefore rendered moot or insignificant. If a woman is considering a job in a work environment that is highly sexually abusive, yet possesses all of the other traits and benefits she is looking for in a job, she may very well choose to work in said environment. Yet because she has chosen to accept the job doesn’t mean she should have to put up with sexual abuse just because it is the current norm. Similarly, because you are willing to go to a bar with all of your friends, despite the extreme health hazards of secondhand smoke, that does not mean you should therefore have to be exposed to that smoke. To be sure, the state must be cautious whenever it regulates private business. But when the regulation will maintain a necessary public health standard, has the potential to stimulate economic growth and meets the desires of the majority of consumers, the state has an obligation to act. Andy Granias ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and legal studies.