smoking.”
I replied, “Well yes, people do that sometimes.”
She goes back to her drawing and then she says, “Well, does he know that can kill him?”
And I said, “Well yeah, he probably does, but, you know, he’s an adult.”
Olivia returns to her drawing. Suddenly she says, “Well, aren’t you on City Council? What are you going to do about that?”
So much for a quiet evening with my daughter!
I started doing research on smoking bans in other large cities; in particular, New York City was in the process of developing this sort of legislation. During this exploratory phase, Katherine Gajewski, an extremely smart and creative policy mind, started working with me as a consultant around the smoking ban legislation. She was a relentless driving force in the messaging, outreach, and advocacy around the issue (eventually, she joined my City Council staff, and would serve as the chief sustainability officer in my administration, leading Philadelphia to become internationally recognized in this area). After I’d done a fairly substantial amount of research on secondhand smoke, and waded through many denials from the tobacco industry about its dangers—just as they had earlier denied that cigarettes were addictive and unhealthy—I introduced a piece of legislation in 2000 for a smoking ban that went nowhere. There was great consternation that the world would end, the economy would tank, and people would lose their jobs.
While New York continued to refine and upgrade their smoking ban to make it even more stringent and encompassing, I kept making amendments and talking to my colleagues, but many were unyielding in their opposition. The tobacco industry was nowhere to be heard, but rest assured that they were behind the scenes, stealthily trying to undermine the legislation. As part of the big tobacco settlement, the large tobacco companies had to release millions of pages of documents. I went through a fair amount of that material since it was publicly available, and found a few documents that indicated that there was actually a significant amount of collusion between the tobacco industry and the liquor industry. I buried my council colleagues with this kind of information and more, but in this particular case I don’t think the information and data mattered as much to the legislation’s ultimate success as two other things.
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