Bill would ban smoking in cars when kids under 12 are present
HARRISBURG, Pa. (KDKA) — Gene Yaw says he got the idea while walking out of a drugstore and looking at a car.
"I saw two adults in the front seat smoking. The windows were all rolled up, and there were two or three little kids in the backseat," Yaw told CBS News in a statement.
"I thought we do all these things to protect kids riding in cars – we have car seats for them, we direct which way the car seat needs to be faced, we tell people you have to wear seatbelts," Yaw said.
But what the adults were doing was perfectly legal. Yaw thought that wasn't right. And being a state senator – a Republican serving Bradford, Lycoming, Sullivan, Tioga and Union counties – he thought he could do something more about it than most people who might have similar thoughts.
Thus was born Senate Bill 279, which Yaw introduced this week. If it becomes law, adults smoking in a car with children under 12 years old could face a $100 fine the first time they're caught. That would rise to $250 for a second offense. Nine states currently restrict smoking in cars carrying children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Secondhand smoke in any quantity is bad for anybody, said Dr. Jamie Garfield, a professor of thoracic medicine and surgery at the Temple Lung Center in Philadelphia and a media representative for the American Lung Association. But she said children are particularly vulnerable.
"They cannot get out of the car or get out of the home," Garfield said. "And so sometimes they are sort of forced, essentially, to have these high levels of secondhand smoke exposure."
She said despite growing awareness of the dangers of secondhand smoke, about 35% of children are still exposed to it.
Aimee Van Cleave, the American Lung Association's director of advocacy for Pennsylvania and West Virginia, said the law is a good start, despite what she considers notable limitations: the application only to children under 12 and the fact that smoking in a car with children would be a secondary offense, meaning an adult could only be ticketed if the driver is first pulled over for something else.
Van Cleave said the association's top legislative priorities include closing what it considers loopholes in Pennsylvania anti-tobacco laws, such as the allowance for indoor smoking in some bars. In its most recent "State of Tobacco Control" report, the association gave Pennsylvania an overall grade of "F."
Still, Yaw said the proposal does close a key loophole in current laws.
It "ties in with what we've done with the smoking laws in Pennsylvania and the elimination of smoking in all public places and restaurants and bars and things of that sort," Yaw said. "It just seems to me when you marry these two things together – what we've done with safety and the extent that we are going to protect children – and then we allow them to be exposed to secondhand smoke in very confined space, it just made sense that if you have kids in the car in that setting, you should not be able to smoke in the car."