A smoking prohibition

It’s a cigarette prohibition, with the smoking ban now potentially affecting employees at certain companies.

Employers across businesses in the medical fields are turning employees away based on whether that person is a smoker or not.

Certain institutions have even implemented urine tests to determine if an employee has been using nicotine.

Places like St. Francis Medical Center in Cape Mirardeau, Miss., have already stopped hiring smokers altogether.

The only companies following this trend appear to be hospitals and other health-related institutions. But this rising trend is indicative of where the smoking bans, being considered across the nation, are going.

Now, not only one can’t smoke in or around an establishment in most major cities, but now just being a smoker can affect chances of getting and maintaining a job.

Besides the unhealthy practice of smoking cigarettes, companies are looking at employees who smoke because of the higher health care costs of employees who smoke compared with employees with healthier lifestyles.

Health insurance companies must be pressing these health institutions to cut cost by inspiring “tobacco free” hiring.

A.G. Sulzberger reports from the New York Times on Friday that “... employees who smoke cost, on average, $3,391 more a year each for health care and lost productivity, according to federal estimates.”

Of course these medical institutions are claiming that they care about “personal wellbeing” and employees that promote healthiness. In other words, employees that fit their ideal image. I can’t help but feel that this is more of a business transaction with insurance companies than a “we want you to be healthy” issue.

The reasoning for the nicotine test, and possible job termination if caught using tobacco, has become increasingly popular, most likely for these economic pressures and benefits to insurance agencies dishing out health care to unhealthy employees.

Treating tobacco use like illegal narcotics, when in fact tobacco is still legal, demonstrates a growing desire for tobacco to become illegal. We might as well consider tobacco the new marijuana.

But tobacco is still legal, and using nicotine tests as a basis for employing people is discrimination against those who legally choose to smoke.

Smoking is bad for you ­— we’ve all heard it a thousand times — but so is a litany of other things. It seems everything can give you cancer these days. And if smoking a cigarette is legal, then why are hospitals and other medical companies treating smoking as a criminal act?

President of the Workrights Institution Lewis Maltby argues, “The number of things that we all do privately that have negative impact on our health is endless. If it’s not smoking, it’s beer. If it’s not beer, it’s cheeseburgers. And what about your sex life?”

Is this not violating certain discrimination laws? And where does this exclusive, rigid hiring process end?

Even more extreme, the same St. Francis Medical Center that first quit hiring smokers has mentioned excluding obese people from hire for similar reasons as smokers.

Our private lives are not our business lives, and after a long day at the office, if I choose to drink a martini, or two, eat six double bacon cheeseburgers, and participate in couples swinging on the weekends, then it is my right to do so.

Smoking tobacco should be a private right of an employee, just like anything else that is not a crime. That is, until our country decides to criminalize it.

Then it will be interesting to see what happens to every 1 out of 5 Americans who smokes when they are forced to quit smoking by the government.

Hello, cigarette black market.  


E-mail: mfiandt@indiana.edu