Calif. Town’s In-Home Smoking Ban Lights Up Opposition

Fellow residents in Edith Frederickson's own government-sponsored retirement complex in Belmont, Calif., helped spark an anti-smoking law that may be the nation's strictest.

As of about two weeks ago, it effectively outlaws smoking in all apartment buildings and even some outdoor areas, reports the New York Times in a front-page article today. Smoking is permitted in single-family homes and their yards, and apartments have designated outdoor smoking areas.

The new municipal law has won accolades from those concerned that secondhand cigarette smoke is infiltrating adjacent apartments and posing a health risk to others, as well as complaints from longtime smokers such as Frederickson.

“I’m absolutely outraged,” the 72-year-old Frederickson told the newspaper recently, as she sat outside her one-room apartment on a concrete slab, smoking a Winston. “They’re telling you how to live and what to do, and they’re doing it right here in America.”

Violators can be fined $100, although apparently no one has yet been ticketed. If Frederickson can afford to, she says, she is going to move.