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Excerpts from: Smokers given breathing space at Health Dept. with 'butt hut'

By Barbara Carmen Dispatch Metro [02/12/02]

A government agency is spending nearly $10,000 on a hut for smokers who find its no-puffing-indoors policy a drag.

It's just your basic smoking shack.

At the Columbus Health Department.

This is the same health department that unsuccessfully pushed a countywide ban on smoking in restaurants, noting the oodles of dollars spent treating smoking-related diseases.

Seems kind of counterintuitive.

"They what?'' asked one woman who works at a hospital that doesn't have such a hut.

"This is a place that promotes health and wellness.''

Marie Collart, president of the Central Ohio Breathing Association, was, well, breathless at the news.

"I'm not sure that providing suffocation units is the best way to serve your employees and the public,'' Collart said.

"This is enabling the smoking behavior.''

Many department nonsmokers are perplexed that managers would spend tax dollars to oblige unhealthy behavior. Let 'em suffer, they say, but they're not meaning to be cruel. Inconvenience prompts quitting, research shows.

"There are those here who share that sentiment,'' said Liane Egle, a Health Department spokeswoman.

"We're dealing with the impact of smoking all the time, and ideally we'd like to have a smoke-free campus. But from a practical point of view, we have to accommodate them.''

Janitors are weary of picking up butts. Nonsmokers complain of being gassed outside doorways. And the department draws about 500 visitors a day -- more than a few of whom are apt to become irate about their right to smoke while they wait for a turn at a clinic.

So a compromise was struck and a butt hut ordered. It looks like a bus-stop shelter with ash cans.

The hut, to cost between $9,000 and $10,000, goes up this week or next behind the building at 240 Parsons Ave., atop a parking ramp.

A couple of umbrellas and some rope to cordon off a designated smoking area would cost only $50. Reminding visitors that people actually survive an entire New York-to-Los Angeles flight without lighting up would be free.

But a butt hut is jazzier for a $28 million building, freshly gutted to house the Health Department.

Managers probably figured that 10 grand isn't much in the scheme of things. The money comes from a bond package, meaning it can't be used to provide services.

But $10,000 might have helped buy equipment -- an X-ray machine? -- at one of the city's neighborhood health clinics. Those clinics face a 15 percent budget cut this year.

On the other hand, the Health Department shopped conservatively. A really decked-out smoking hut can set you back as much as $50,000.

Mount Carmel West has two of the nicer models -- both privately funded -- with automatic sliding doors, lights, heaters, security alarms and fans.

"There was a discussion five years ago when we ordered them,'' said Janice Piscitelli, a hospital spokeswoman. "The alternative was that we would have people smoking at our entrances.

"It used to be that when you walked into the hospital, you walked through an ashtray.''

Mount Carmel patients also get counseling about how to quit.

But the best approach belongs to Ohio State University Medical Center, where smokers are guided to isolated areas outdoors.

The university even provides reading materials: Brochures in bins describe the dangers of smoking and offer help to stop.

If this doesn't take, a patient eventually might qualify for the single room at the medical center where smoking is permitted under tightly controlled circumstances.

Here, doctors conduct research, perhaps studying how smoking affects a patient's disease or medication.

It must be hard to feel like a macho Marlboro Man when you are, in essence, a lab rat