By Douglas Burns

Vickie Ewoldt, proprietor of Vic's Main Tap in Audubon, displays this Soviet flag in her bar to protest the eight-month-old Iowa smoking ban. The flag is knotted to show that it hangs in protest, not allegiance to the former Communist superpower.

When Frank Sinatra, one of America's most famous smokers, died (at age 82, baby), one tribute observed that thousands of men on thousands of bar stools would no longer be able to ask, "What would Frank do?"_

Sinatra expired in 1998, and we've made it a decade without the philosopher-king of love and loss, the crooner with spot-on instincts in the world of handling a punch in the gut and making it to work the next day._

For the last eight months, with a nearly complete statewide indoor smoking ban in effect, many Iowans have been in something of a prolonged mourning for the passing of Sinatra's defiant prop, the barroom cigarette.

An underappreciated part of our culture, particularly in rural and working-class reaches of the Hawkeye State, died last July 1. Small-town and working-class bars are supposed to be a bit irreverent, dimly lit places to escape the bully boss, pending divorce, or the drudgery of a Working Joe life. Smoking is a part of this for many Iowans - or it least it was (legally) until last summer.

"I'm not justifying smoking, but it was part of the culture," said Paul Lasley, chairman of both the Sociology and Anthropology departments at Iowa State University. "This disruption of social life in a small community is one of the unintended consequences of the smoking ban."

At one time, but not so much anymore, the rural Iowa bar took our social ranks, our vanities and high-hatting of others, and crushed them like so much ice in a blender._ _

The farmer with his Pall Malls eased up to the bar with the banker and his Camels and argued with the newspaperman who smokes American Spirits. They wondered about things like why Magic Johnson hasn't died of AIDS yet or what's the deal with the city council or is it a fair bet on the golf tournament to take Tiger Woods against the field.

Now that collection of characters can huddle outside together, if they show up at all.

"It's just a total bad situation, yeah it is," said Vickie Ewoldt, the 60-year-old owner of Vic's Main Tap in the southwest Iowa county seat town of Audubon.

Ewoldt says her bar's business is down about 40 percent since the start of the ban.

As other Iowa business owners were downloading "no smoking" signs from the Internet to comply with the first day of a statewide indoor ban, Ewoldt was scrambling for something else. She was searching for a flag, not an American flag, certainly not Iowa's.__

No, this longtime bar owner wanted a Soviet flag at her bar in protest of the new law.

"It's getting more communist all the time," she said.

Today the flag is in the bar with a sign that clearly informs people why it's there. Some National Guardsmen took issue with its presence for reasons of more global import than whether someone was dragging down a Kool with a Budweiser, but were satisfied when Ewoldt knotted the bottom of the flag, a sign that it is flying in protest, not allegiance.

Ewoldt, who smokes Misty Ultra Lights (outside now, she notes), has worked at the bar since 1983 - and owned it since 1986._

She's worried about business.

Residents in some Iowa cities, Audubon and Clinton for example, have constructed their own personal bars in garages, where friends bring their own beverages or just grab a beer from the refrigerator.

Ewoldt is losing customers, and unlike in the suburban chain eateries or urban centers, there isn't a replacement class of patrons flocking to fill the stools left empty by dispirited smokers.

"I don't have any new ones coming in," Ewoldt said.

Not all bar owners take such a dismal view of the ban.

Jeff Bruning, a co-owner with Full Court Press Inc., is involved with a number of well-known Des Moines nightspots and eateries from The Royal Mile and High Life Lounge to Shorty's and the Hessen Haus.

Bruning said that after the ban went into effect at the High Life, "strollers started coming into our business."

With rural Republican roots, Bruning has what could best be described as a nuanced position on the ban.

Bruning said he didn't like the idea of being legislated. But he also didn't want to see a hopscotching of local smoking ordinances that likely would have sent smokers to the smaller rural cities ringing Des Moines and its suburbs.

"I was scared the law would be city by city," Bruning said.

Bruning didn't want to take the step of going smoke free without the government intervention.

"Our places were known as the smokiest bars in town," Bruning said.

His all-things-considered final take on the ban: "I personally wouldn't like to see it go back."

Bruning does see a rural-urban element in the smoking issue.

"I live in a town that's different than living in a small town," he said.

Bruning added, "It's not like smoking is on an upward swing, unfortunately that kind of coincides with small-town Iowa."

In the eastern Iowa river city of Clinton, bar owners may not be any more angry about the ban than elsewhere. But they are organized. Clinton businessman Jonathan Van Roekel is president of Choose Freedom Iowa, a statewide coalition protesting the ban. And there's the active Clinton Organized Bar and Restaurant Association. Both organizations are plaintiffs in a lawsuit in Polk County challenging the legality of the ban.

State Rep. Rob Roberts, R-Carroll, says the smoking ban could be a major topic for Republicans in 2010.

Remarkably, yet understandably in some twisted sense, smokers see this as a stand for the rights of individual self-determination, even if in the end that means self-destruction.

Clinton has received a good deal of media attention for the bars' defiant attitude toward the ban.

"There aren't worst places," said Bonnie Mapes, director of the state's Division of Tobacco Use Prevention and Control. "There are businesses that are making a very public opposition to the law."

For his part Van Roekel says class is a factor in the smoking ban.

"It's the blue-collar workers who primarily fund the bars and taverns," said Van Roekel. "Right now, businesses are suffering. They're dying."

He argues that a repeal of the ban would function as a "stimulus" for many small businesses in Iowa.

Lasley, a co-investigator of the Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll, said some of the anger with the smoking ban in rural parts of the state may reflect other concerns.

"I suspect that part of that is the acknowledgment that it's not the same anymore," Lasley said.

Small-group dynamics are at play in rural Iowa bars as long-time smokers, unable or unwilling to quit, are estranged from places where they may have been fixtures for decades.

"It's probably more visible than it would be in suburban or urban settings," Lasley said. "We're probably underestimating the value of affiliation."

A native of Queen City, Mo., Lasley thinks the legislature should have exempted bars from the smoking ban.

"We're talking about adults, adult behavior," he said.

Lasley said local control in this case makes sense and he sees a compromise possible in the form of age-restricting people under 21 out of smoking venues.

"Maybe we ought to rethink that and have an exclusion," he said of the current law. "The local bar owners should be able to work these things out without a prohibition."

The points of contention with the law surround bars and casinos. Most smokers don't protest prohibitions elsewhere.

The Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH), the agency charged with administering The Smoke Free Air Act in the state's 82,000 businesses, fields complaints and questions about the ban from a variety of angles.

But the majority of the concerns do center on bars, said Mapes, whose division falls under the IDPH. An amendment that would have allowed smoking in all Hawkeye State bars fell just one vote short in the Iowa House.

"Overall, the vast majority of businesses are complying with the law," Mapes said. "It's a great public health step forward in Iowa."

Mapes believes she holds three trump cards in the debate.

She deals with the issue fully in terms of public health, not property rights. And Mapes says the debate on health is settled. In fact, she expects Iowa to see decreases in low birth weights and complications during pregnancies right away.

"You'll see an immediate drop," Mapes said.

Increases in cigarette taxes spur cold turkey life choices, while laws like the indoor smoke free act put smokers on a slow road to quitting, Mapes said.

"It really does motivate people to cut back on their smoking and quit, but it's a slower process," she said.

In other states where bans have been in place longer than in Iowa, hospital admissions for heart-related complications fall, she said.

Iowa Public Health officials are joining with the University of Iowa on a new study Mapes fully expects to prove just that.

What's more, Mapes and the non-smoking movement have the law on their side now - no small thing as she pointed out repeatedly during an interview.

And then there are the sheer numbers.

In 2008, prevalence of current cigarette use among adult Iowans was 14 percent, which is down from 18 percent in 2006, according to the Adult Tobacco Survey conducted by the University of Northern Iowa. The rate of 14 percent in 2008 represents approximately 327,000 adult Iowans as compared to 406,000 adult Iowans in 2006. The 2008 rate continues a trend of decreasing smoking rates in Iowa. From 2002 to 2008, there has been a 39 percent decrease in the prevalence rates of current

2008 gaming revenues: Gaming in Iowa is big business

cigarette use.

Of course, the places where the smoking debate continues, bars and casinos, have much higher rates of tobacco use. Just before 6 p.m. on June 30, the last day of legal indoor smoking in Iowa bars, I counted 15 smokers among the 19 people in Kerp's Tavern in Carroll - including a bartender with a Marlboro Light.

Smoking peaked in the United States in the mid-1960s when nearly half of adult Americans admitted to the habit.

It might be about time that the Legislature, which imposed the smoking ban on Iowans, admitted to its own addiction to tobacco, albeit a financial one.

Legislators passed the Iowa Smoke Free Air Act using largely a moral argument about workplace safety. Non-smoking employees, advocates of the ban argued, shouldn't be subjected to smokers - unless, of course, they work in one of the 17 casinos regulated by the state. In these gaming houses, blackjack players and slot zombies can still smoke to their lungs' content, sometimes with fuming cigarettes dangling just a foot or two from card dealers. To see smokers shivering outside of the bars in small towns on a drive to the casinos in Council Bluffs makes the exemption seem cough-out-loud absurd to many.

Strident anti-smokers and rebellious Marlboro men may not agree on much. But people from both camps have joined a chorus that sees ranks hypocrisy at work in the law that exempts casinos.

But everyone has a price, right?

Casinos provide about $300 million in taxes annually in Iowa.

Using figures on losses in Illinois casinos after that state's more sweeping ban went into effect in 2008, Iowa gaming industry officials estimate that if the ban were extended to casinos, the annual losses in income could be between 25 percent to 30 percent in Iowa.

What is clear is that casino business is down since the ban started in Illinois. Revenue at Illinois casinos dropped 20.2 percent between November 2007 and November 2008, according to the most recent figures available from the Illinois Gaming Board, The Chicago Tribune reported.

It's one thing to hurt casinos with the ban, but if the state of Iowa goes deeper into bed with the industry by tying debt to its fortunes as Gov. Chet Culver proposes with an infrastructure plan, can the government stand by and absorb the expected loss associated with a smoking ban?

"Not at the revenue shortfalls we already have today," state Auditor Dave Vaudt said. "We're spending well in advance of our ongoing revenue stream."

Simply put, Vaudt, a potential GOP gubernatorial candidate, said, "At the rate we're spending, we can't afford the declines that would probably occur because of the smoking ban."

The gaming exemption conceivably could force a change in the law or at least a come-to-Jesus session for those who rationalize the casino exemption. In Louisville, Ky., a citywide ordinance banning indoor smoking exempted the interior of the historic Churchill Downs racetrack, home of the Kentucky Derby and its atmosphere of booze and tobacco smoke. A judge ruled the exemption unconstitutional, and Louisville now has a law that includes the indoor area of the facility.

If the courts forced their hands, would Iowa legislators be able to watch the casino money evaporate?

Iowa Gaming Association president Wes Ehrecke said the losses in Iowa could be worse than Illinois because of the presence of Native American casinos that could take advantage of a smoking ban that wouldn't extend to their somewhat sovereign soil.

"They could build to the market if you will," Ehrecke said.
Ehrecke estimates that smoking rates in state-regulated casinos run between 30 and 35 percent depending on the time of day.
"It ranges from property to property," Ehrecke said.

Ehrecke doesn't expect any movement on the smoking ban in the current legislative session.

"There's not going to be debate on this, this session," Ehrecke said. "It's really hard to predict what the Legislature might do in future years."

Legislative leaders have said they aren't going to allow votes on any number of smoking-related proposals, as such actions would be the political equivalent of waving a hot dog inside the lion cage at the zoo.

This doesn't mean legislators aren't trying to tinker with the ban.

State Rep. McKinley Bailey, D-Webster City, is shepherding legislation backed by a bi-partisan majority in the Iowa House that would allow smoking in outdoor areas of both bars and restaurants. As it stands the law allows smoking outside of bars, or places of business where food service is "incidental."

"The biggest frustration is with the way it applies outdoors," Bailey said.

Bailey said the definitions of what constitute bars and restaurants are "pretty ridiculous."

"The Department of Public Health overstepped its bounds," he said.

House Commerce Committee Chairwoman Janet Peterson, D-Des Moines, is on record saying she won't let any bills dealing with the ban out - including Bailey's.

One smoking ban opponent, State Rep. Rod Roberts, R-Carroll, another potential Republican candidate for governor, says the culture of the legislature is that when major measures like the smoking law are enacted, it's unlikely they'll be reversed.

"It's there to stay," Roberts said. "It would take a major effort to repeal any of this."

Roberts said the smoking-ban issue could be a live one for Republicans in 2010. While only a small percentage of the population smokes today, some could be radicalized enough to become single-issue voters for one cycle, which could pay big dividends in a squeaker election. What's more, Roberts thinks the smoking ban can be parlayed into a leading example of big government bullying the average citizen - something that may play with Iowa voters as stimulus-minded state and national governments expand their reach.

"What I see coming is the greater theme of how much government intrusion people want in their lives," Roberts said. CV

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