Smoking bans catching on at Calif. beaches

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- Cities up and down the Southern California coast are fed up with beachgoers who stick not only their toes in the sand, but their cigarette butts, too.

Next week, Los Angeles and Santa Monica are expected to finalize bans on smoking on their beaches. Two smaller cities along the coast already have such bans. Supporters of the prohibitions cite secondhand smoke, the toxins that discarded cigarette butts leave in the sand and water, and the massive litter problem the butts create.

''There's nothing worse than sitting on the beach, junior is digging around in the sand, and what does he come up with?" said Herb Katz, a city councilman in Santa Monica, an upscale beach city surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles. ''If we do this [ban], we get a twofer -- we get the air cleaned up, and we get rid of the cigarette butts."

Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss, sponsor of that city's proposed ordinance, compared the beach laws to the decade-old ban on smoking in local restaurants, a once-controversial prohibition that has since spread around the country. ''What I'm trying to do is change people's attitudes about where it's socially acceptable to smoke," he said. ''Now when you go into a restaurant and there's smoking, it strikes you as wrong. I want to do the same thing with beaches."

Opponents decry the laws as unnecessary government intrusions.

''Santa Monica has more pressing problems than cigarette butts," said Mary Cordray, 45, a former resident of Westford and Chelmsford, Mass. She was smoking recently as she walked along the beach in Santa Monica, a community of 86,000 where she has lived for the past six years.

Cordray said she is more disturbed by discarded drug paraphernalia on the beach: ''What about the crack addicts and the heroin addicts? Why don't they worry about that instead of smoking?"

Others criticize what they see as an erosion of smokers' freedom to puff in an open area. Two of six Santa Monica City Council members voted against the ban, citing civil liberties concerns.

''Is smoking a right or a privilege?" countered Katz, who said he is a ''reformed smoker" who supports the measure. ''It affects other people. I figure, if [the secondhand smoke is] that bad, I'll move. But then again, why should I move?"

Another argument says the ban would hurt tourism. Although about 16 percent of Californians smoke, the percentage is more than twice that among visitors from elsewhere in the country and overseas.

But Weiss said he does not think tourists seek out the beach to light up: ''They come to enjoy the natural beauty."

If Los Angeles approves its ban, as Weiss expects in the coming weeks, it would combine with Santa Monica's ordinance to create a smoke-free swath of beach 13 miles long. Farther down the coast, the small Orange County city of San Clemente instituted a beach smoking ban in March, and the trend in California started in October, just a few miles to the south in Solana Beach, a community of 14,000 in northern San Diego County.

Beginning at least a decade ago, beach smoking bans have been imposed in a small number of places, including Hanauma Bay in Honolulu and freshwater lakes in Sharon, Mass. In recent years, bans have been proposed in Chicago and the states of New York and Delaware.

The antismoking movement in California -- although spurred by a coalition of environmentalists and health organizations, including the Surfrider Foundation -- got its start from a high school group. The Youth Tobacco Prevention Corps swayed the Solana Beach Council with a sample of the 6,300 cigarette butts the group gathered in one hour last fall, along the city's 1.5-mile stretch of sand. In another cleanup, on Sept. 21, half the 230 pounds of debris plucked from the beach consisted of cigarette butts.

''It was really disgusting. We saw a sea gull that had a cigarette butt in its mouth," said Steven Gallegos, director of public advocacy for the American Heart Association in Los Angeles. ''When I saw these kids playing on the beach and pulling up these cigarette butts, it's very sad. And all the butts that are being washed out to sea -- it's another environmental hazard we have a chance to have an impact on.

''When you have people going on the beach and treating it like an ashtray, it can create quite a health and safety problem," he said.

Robin Finn visited Santa Monica Beach recently with her husband and their children. Miranda, 4, chased sea gulls, while her 1-year-old brother, Eli, toddled around a grassy area alongside the broad expanse of crystalline shoreline. ''People want their children to enjoy a smoke-free environment," Finn said.

Instead of deterring visitors, Katz said, the smoking restrictions will protect a tourist attraction -- the 95-year-old Santa Monica Pier, the terminus of famed Route 66. Katz said still-burning cigarette butts roll between the planks and ignite debris wedged there, and several damaging fires had to be doused last year.

The coastal cities are considering how strenuously to enforce their laws. Santa Monica is expected to set a $250 fine but will offer a three-month warning period.

Weiss said his proposal would give beachgoers in Los Angeles ammunition to ask smokers around them to cease: ''We enforce rules in society by measures other than calling in the SWAT team."