- guardian.co.uk, Sunday March 30 2003 00.44 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday March 30 2003
The prime rib-steak smoked in tobacco leaves went down well. Then Robert de Niro and Danny de Vito kicked back and fired up their Cuban Montecristo cigars. This was not on a film set, nor two wealthy actors simply enjoying a normal dining experience. This was The Last Smoke.
When the clock struck midnight last night, New York - capital of crazy, home of the wild in the land of the free - brought in a smoking ban in the city's bars and restaurants. What Rudy Giuliani began in the great Big Apple clean-up, business tycoon Mayor Michael Bloomberg is determined to finish.
Many hoped for a last-minute reprieve or at least a delay. 'There's a war on. We are a prime terrorist target. How can New Yorkers not need a ciggy with their drink?' asked lawyer Mary Steinberg, 36, leaving a Brooklyn kiosk with her $7.90 (£5) pack of Camel, one of the most heavily taxed and pricey puffs on the planet.
So instead of stubbing out and going home. New York spent last week in a blow-out, a smokeathon, the final ash-bash. De Niro and De Vito joined 280 guests in the ballroom of the Regent Wall Street Hotel, where Liza Minnelli held her wedding party last year, for a $95-a-head Last Smoke dinner.
Management emptied their cigar humidors that were filled with the finest hand-rolled, worth up to $50 apiece. 'It was phenomenal. We even ate tuna loin wrapped in tobacco leaf,' said one guest.
Bloomberg claims the new law will help people quit and save an estimated 1,000 lives a year in the city, and that figure, he says, does not even count the smokers but the people who die from illnesses brought on by breathing second-hand smoke.
The city has even hired an army of inspectors who will tour bars and restaurants from today, confiscating ashtrays and issuing warnings in a 30-day grace period before fines of up to £2,000 start being slapped on bar owners.
Some businesses are trying to look on the bright side. Midtown Manhattan's Brasserie 8 is today launching the Smoker's Revenge dessert, an oversized white chocolate 'cigarette' filled with tiramisu and topped with sugar-spun 'smoke'. And at the World Bar in property tycoon Donald Trump's World Tower, staff have invented the Smokeless Manhattan cocktail, designed to elicit the taste of a Marlboro. Barman Chris Drescher, 27, carefully mixed three parts Churchill's tawny port with the Scottish island of Islay's own ultra-smokey Laphroaig whisky, dashed in a spurt of orange bitters and a slice of orange peel, with a cherry.
But it was certainly not to the taste of nearby Goldman Sachs stockbroker David Rotter, 28, who was revving up for a night on the town and smoking like his life depended on it. 'Bloomberg can stick it. I'm going to smoke anyway. Alcohol and cigarettes are like brother and sister, and it is terrible timing, with everything here in turmoil,' he said, encompassing in one eyebrow flick the shot economy, the battered bravado of post 9/11 New Yorkers and the bombing scenes on the TV in the corner.
Bloomberg's crusade against tobacco will not go unnoticed in like-minded capital cities around the world. While the anti-smoking lobby heralds it as a victory for common sense, smokers will view it as part of the ongoing global war against the cigarette. In the cafes of Paris, in particular, the reluctant stubbing out in the bars and restaurants of Manhattan will be eagerly monitored.
While America and France have had little to agree on lately, to say the least, this is a subject where President Jacques Chirac and the Americans are suddenly as close as strikes in a matchbook.
More than a decade after kicking a two-packets-a-day habit to improve his image in the presidential race, Chirac last week launched a 'war on tobacco'. He wants to ban cigarette sales to under-16s, increase prices and intensify the clampdown on smoking in public places in a £300 million campaign to reduce the annual 150,000 French deaths from cancer.
After the moves in New York and France, smokers in the UK will be nervously lighting up and asking: could a smoking ban happen here?
Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the British Medical Association's head of science and ethics, is in no doubt. 'By not banning smoking in public places the Government is putting the health of vast numbers of the population at risk and is also placing a huge burden on the NHS. In line with the 'polluter pays' principle it's time the tobacco companies picked up the tab for the harm their products are doing.'
After New York's bold step, health campaigners here want fewer voluntary measures and more legislation. Dr Sinead Jones, director of the UK Tobacco Control Resource Centre, said: 'Tobacco smoke is a potent cocktail of over 4,000 toxins, more than 50 of which cause cancer. We want action and we don't want to wait another five years as we did for a ban on tobacco advertising.'
But Britain's restaurateurs believe a compulsory ban is not the answer. 'We would prefer self regulation by individual restaurants,' said Miles Quest of the Restaurant Association. 'We don't believe it is right for government to tell customers and restaurateurs what they can and can't do. Some of our members have already decided to ban smoking within their restaurants, which is fair enough, but decisions that effect their commercial livelihood should be left up to the individual.'
In America the battle against smoking has been far less a federal effort than a local one. It has been spurred on by individuals, states or city authorities. The tobacco giants have been sued for multi-billions in class actions and the Justice Department is currently pursuing what it sees as their ill-gotten profits in a $298bn case.
Although the US government has always been reluctant to rein in its successful and very traditional tobacco industry, California has been virtually a public smoke-free zone for years. Californian Professor Stan Glantz, whose investigations into smoking's dangers formed the background for the film The Insider, starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, said there had been tremendous progress. 'There's no single magic bullet that will destroy the world's tobacco compa nies, but the prospect of a world free of the industry is looking more likely than I would ever have thought possible a few years ago.'
Back in the World Bar in Manhattan, the atmosphere remained subdued. It is usually full of suited diplomats from the United Nations building opposite, but the air of defeat and resignation hanging over that particular institution had wafted over into the World Bar as potently as a smoke ring from a Montecristo.
The only exemptions from today will be for a handful of officially licensed cigar bars, small bars where the owner is the only employee - and therefore, the theory goes, not forcing his co-workers to breath customers' smoke - and uncovered patios or specially-built smoking rooms adjoining bars.
Many businesses claim they will go belly-up but Bloomberg denies this, saying New York restaurants have coped admirably with smoking restrictions in place since 1995.
Hector Batista of the American Cancer Society gleefully took a hammer last week and smashed a pile of glass ashtrays at a 'Breath of Fresh Air' party in the City Hall restaurant close to the mayor's lair. 'This is not about business, this is about health,' he cried.
Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain reckons it is about both business and pleasure, and disagreed with Batista on both scores as he sulked deeply at his Les Halles restaurant on Park Avenue last week. As one of the fifth of New Yorkers who smokes, Bourdain was hopping mad. He fumed: 'I've resigned myself to huddling in doorways in the cold and rain with the rest of the despised minority.'
UK smokers might be wise to start resigning themselves to a similar fate: if the ban follows so many other trends in life, what starts in New York may soon reach London.
