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Excerpts from: BLOOMY SET TO STUB OUT SMOKING AT PHILIP MORRIS

By GERSH KUNTZMAN http://www.nypost.com/ [10/07/02]
 
THERE'S an office tower across from Grand Central Terminal where you never see those sad groups of smokers huddled out front like heroin addicts at a methadone clinic.

That's because people who work in this Park Avenue building - the headquarters of tobacco giant Philip Morris - can smoke all they want inside. The company even provides the cigarettes.

"It's disgusting," said one nonsmoker who works for the company. "They chain-smoke at their desk! The first thing I smell when I get to the office is smoke."

But this last citadel of unbridled, unregulated, unfettered, unapologetic smoking is about to fall. Buried in the fine print of Mayor Bloomberg's new anti-smoking proposal - the one that would ban smoking in all restaurants, bars and even (is it possible?) bingo halls - is the ultimate low blow to the tobacco industry: Smoking would become illegal within the tobacco companies' offices themselves.

Hardball politics led to the exemption in the first place. In 1995, Philip Morris threatened to abandon New York (and take thousands of jobs with it) if the anti-smoking law passed.

The city went ahead anyway - but then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Council Speaker Peter Vallone huddled in a smoke-free room and agreed to let tobacco employees continue puffing their lives away.

But Bloomberg is going after Section 17-505 of the city Administrative Code - the so-called "Philip Morris rule."

A mayoral spokesman said the goal is to eliminate every exemption so there's no confusion about where smoking is illegal and legal.

Philip Morris did not return calls. And when I say that, I mean that the company ignored more than 40 phone calls over the last six months.