Now Entering California, Please Extinguish All Smoking Materials

Yesterday California's cigar smoking Republican Governor vetoed one so-called 'nanny bill', which would have extended the age at which a child must ride in a car seat, while signing another, SB 7 by State Senator Jenny Oropeza, which will make it illegal to smoke in a vehicle carrying a child under the age of 18.

Bravo, Governor Schwarzenegger and bravo Senator Oropeza. And it's too bad we have to pass laws to get people to behave in a responsible manner when it comes to smoking, given all we know about the dangers of second hand smoke. Every day I see parents driving in cars with toddlers, infants, young children, puffing away. Sometimes they are thoughtful enough to crack a window, but usually in this case they then toss the discarded but still lit cigarette out the car window. In the town where I live we had two major fires right outside the high school my two older children attend this week caused by discarded cigarettes. So, SB 7 may indeed be saving two birds with one stone. If you can't smoke in a car carrying a minor, you also can't toss your lit cigarette out your window onto the highway, the roadway, into the bushes or into the open window of the car riding in the next lane.

SB 7 makes driving while smoking a 'secondary offense', meaning a highway patrol officer or police officer can't pull a car over and cite the driver simply because he or she spotted smokey Joe driving. No, there has to be a tail light out, a rolling stop, swerving, lane change without a signal, etc. going on too. But, given how people drive in California, that seems an easy enough hurdle for any conscientious law enforcement officer to get over. So, if you're driving into California hauling any minors, please extinguish all smoking smoking materials at the border.

Even someone as sensible, business friendly and big on personal freedoms as cigar chomping Arnold Schwarzenegger knows it isn't acting like a nanny when you acknowledge the severe harm that can be done to children by second hand cigarette smoke. And never are you as trapped as you are in a vehicle. I know. I grew up in a family with a smoking parent. Of course, we also had one radical, non-smoking parent who forbade our father from smoking in our house, or garage, or in the car with the kids. And my father, who died prematurely of heart disease at the age of 54, dutifully obliged. In fact, as he was dying, finally smoke free in his final year of life on earth, he apologized to each of his seven surviving daughters for ever having smoked around us, and he was happy to see none of us grew up to be smokers. As a lifelong asthmatic who struggles with respiratory issues every day, I am grateful both for my mother's insistence and for my father's adherence to a modest accommodation. I don't think his quality of life was in any way hampered by smoking outside, or at work (which is, of course, a bygone luxury now too), or only when driving solo (with the windows down so as not to pollute the vehicle). No, what hampered my father's quality of life was cigarette smoke, since the age of 17. What cut his life short was not my mother's nagging, or the occasional damp season cold tangentially connected to his outdoor smoking perch: it was nicotine, ten to fifteen times a day for thirty some years.

I want to thank and applaud Governor Schwarzenegger, and my personal friend Jenny Oropeza for their courage and foresight in writing and signing legislation that will greatly improve the quality of life for so many children. I have so many happy memories of our summer car trips with my father, to the Space Needle, Yosemite, Crater Lake, to every little gold mining town in California and all of its missions, to Lake Tahoe, Virginia City, Tijuana, San Diego, Carlsbad Caverns, you name it. In all of those memories I am breathing freely as are all of my sisters. I can't imagine what my quality of life would be like today had my father smoked in our home, in our car as he drove us to and from school and everywhere else, and on our summer sojourns. I don't even know if I would be alive today if our family had a different dynamic and my father thought his right to smoke outweighed my right to breathe freely. I like to think of him as an early pioneer of not just a sensible way of life, but a responsible one. I'm sure he smoked hundreds fewer cigarettes every year because of the restrictions on where and when he could smoke. Maybe that bought him a few years, tacked on to all the extra years he gave his children.

Call it a nanny law if you want, but it is and will continue to be a life saver. And for all those people out there who have been lighting up with their children and other young people in their cars all these years, please extinguish your cigarettes before getting into a car. The life you save may be your own.