Here is a link to an article written about why hypnosis is such a powerful tool in smoking cessation.

http://www.hypnosis.edu/articles/smoking/cessation.asp

(02-06) 12:02 PST REDWOOD CITY — Smoking will be outlawed in all parks, beaches and recreation areas owned by San Mateo County, under a new ordinance approved unanimously by the county Board of Supervisors this morning.

The county is one of several in the state, including San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, to adopt bans in public recreation areas. The city council in Pacifica banned smoking on city beaches and the city fishing pier in September in an effort to reduce cigarette litter.

Last year, San Mateo supervisors banned smokers from lighting up anywhere within 30 feet of county buildings. Supervisor Rich Gordon, who sponsored the legislation approved today, said he was concerned about litter from cigarette butts, second hand smoke and fire hazards.

The new law will go into effect in mid-March.

E-mail Diana Walsh at dwalsh@sfchronicle.com.

Hoping to see fewer cigarette butts on the beaches of Pacifica, the City Council voted unanimously Monday night to ban smoking on public beaches and the town’s popular fishing pier.

When the law goes into effect at the end of October, the beaches and pier will become part of a growing list of outdoor public spaces — including many beaches in Southern California — where smoking is prohibited. Pacifica is believed to be the first city in the Bay Area to outlaw smoking on its waterfront.

Cigarette butts are the most common form of litter found along beaches, according to the Ocean Conservancy, which conducts annual coastline cleanups.

Pacifica’s four public beaches usually rank among the highest for the amount of cigarette litter collected, according to Susan Danielson, who led San Mateo County’s coastline cleanup for the past two years and pushed the council to adopt the smoking ban. Three cleanups yielded more than 1,200 butts on the beaches and a one-day effort to clear the pier of trash netted 920 butts.

“I’m really thrilled,” Danielson said Tuesday about the new law. “I’ve been picking up butts for six to seven years.”

Unlike many other forms of trash, cigarette butts can take years to decompose and pose a threat to wildlife on land and in the sea.

Violators of Pacifica’s ban will be fined $100 for a first offense, $200 for a second offense and $500 for a third or subsequent offenses. Police, however, won’t be asked to patrol the beaches or pier in search of violators.

By posting signs and raising public awareness about the ban, Pacifica officials said, they will be relying mostly on self-policing and peer pressure to enforce the ban.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/13/BAGO3L4L5K1.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The most sweeping anti-smoking law in the world gets its first public airing tonight in the Peninsula city of Belmont, which aims to curb the harmful effects of second-hand smoke.

Lighting up on a sidewalk in the city of 25,000 residents: verboten. Puffing away in an apartment building: no way. Smoking in the company car: sorry. Even smoking in your own home could be a nuisance if a neighbor complained about the wafting smoke.

“I’m looking at protecting people who are bothered medically by secondhand smoke — that’s my bottom line,” Mayor Coralin Feierbach said. “There is so much evidence out there that second-hand smoke can be injurious to your health. If people are aware of this and are bothered by this, this would give them some kind of recourse.”

The proposal to be considered by Belmont’s City Council is the latest of several anti-smoking laws proposed in California in the past year. Local governments have acted to reduce the side effects of smoking since the California Air Resources Board found last year that second-hand smoke is a toxic air contaminant that can contribute to serious illness and even death.

Dozens of cities now prevent smoking in the entryways of privately owned buildings, for outdoor dining and in parks and gardens. And while the measure is backed by groups including the American Lung Association, some people think the plan goes too far.

“It’s an extreme measure whether you are a smoker or a nonsmoker,” said Mary Morrissey Parden, a nonsmoker who runs an insurance business in Belmont and is a past president of the Belmont Chamber of Commerce. “It pretty much says no smoking within the borders of Belmont.”

Joshua Howard, spokesman for a division of the California Apartment Association representing San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz county landlords, said, “We are in no way advocates of smoking, but we don’t feel the government should be telling individuals what they should do in their homes or telling landlords … what should be going on in their units.”

The mayor said she began looking last fall into strengthening the city’s smoking regulations, which already ban smoking in indoor workplaces and most public buildings, after a resident at a retirement home in the city wrote to complain that he was suffering from health problems as a result of second-hand smoke from fellow residents.

“It’s the kitchen sink,” she said of the current proposal. “It’s a beautiful piece of work.”

The city enlisted the help of the Public Health Institute in Oakland, which has drafted anti-smoking laws for dozens of cities.

Robin Salsburg, staff attorney for the institute and author of the proposed ordinance, said other cities already have adopted at least some of what Belmont is considering, including a prohibition of smoking at entranceways of public buildings, on city sidewalks and at outdoor seating areas at restaurants.

What makes the Belmont ordinance different is that it also seeks to ban smoking in individual apartments and in cars that are used for business.

“They wanted to ban smoking everywhere in the city of Belmont except in single-family residences,” Salsburg said.

Salsburg says the proposed ordinance gives City Council members a menu of anti-smoking options. For example, the council could either ban smoking altogether in apartment units or require landlords to set aside a certain percentage of units for nonsmokers while reserving some for smokers.

Council members also are given the option of prohibiting smoking on all city streets and sidewalks or only during street fairs and parades.

Feierbach said she hoped the final law would be a much simplified version of the current proposal and would resemble a law passed by the East Bay city of Dublin last year.

That law declared secondhand smoke a nuisance, but Dublin officials also passed a resolution saying they wouldn’t spend any money to enforce the new law, according to Salsburg. Feierbach says the city won’t be asking police to patrol the streets looking for smokers, but the ordinance would be enforced if someone complained about a smoker to authorities, she said.

“It’s not like police are going to go check out everyone who is smoking,” she said. “It’s complaint-driven. If somebody smokes and nobody complains, then they can keep smoking all they want.

“I want an ordinance that is easy to enforce and is simple,” she said.

The Belmont ordinance — which anti-smoking advocates say has the most extensive reach of any proposal so far — has found its way into an international debate over smoking.

City officials said that after the city first proposed the idea for the sweeping law in November, e-mails and letters for and against the ban began flooding in from Canada, England, Australia and all parts of the country.

“There were e-mails from all over the world,” said Marc Zafferano, Belmont’s city attorney.

Feierbach said one Internet blog that is against smoking bans depicted her as a Nazi, complete with uniform.

“These people thought they could scare me or scare us, but what they’ve done is made my feelings stronger,” she said.

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Belmont plans to cut second-hand smokeThe city’s draft ordinance proposes these restrictions, among others:

– Declares second-hand smoke a nuisance.

– Extends the city’s current smoking restrictions to individual apartments.

– Prohibits smoking in cars used in employment, including taxis.

– Gives the City Council the option of banning smoking on streets and sidewalks all the time, only during fairs and parades, or in designated smoking areas.

– Bans smoking while waiting in lines for movies, ATMs or buses.

– Prohibits smoking in outdoor public places such as parks, stadiums, sports fields, recreation trails and shopping malls.

– Bans smoking in outdoor workplaces, including restaurants and construction sites.

Source: City of Belmont

E-mail Diana Walsh at dwalsh@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/13/MNGRHOK7RS1.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The days of languorous lounge lizards exhaling curling wisps of cigarette smoke in hotel bars or lingering over cigars in the lobby — already a thing of the past in California, thanks to the state’s smoking laws — could be numbered nationwide, too. Even puffing away behind the closed doors of a guest room could be banned.

Responding to health-minded consumers, and seeking to cut cleaning costs, U.S. hotels are moving to snuff out smoking.

In February, Westin Hotels and Resorts, a brand of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc., banned smoking in its 77 North American properties. Next month, Marriott Hotels and Resorts will do the same in its 2,300 North American properties.

Other operators — including San Francisco boutique hoteliers Joie de Vivre Hospitality and Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group LLP — already designate a few hotels as smoke-free. Over time, they might expand their smoke-free offerings, executives at the companies say.

Hotel smoking bans are coming about chiefly in response to a demand by health-conscious customers for breathable air and guest rooms free of the smell of stale smoke, hoteliers say. Additionally, industry analysts point out, operators can save thousands of dollars per room every year when they no longer have to do deep cleaning of fabrics and hard surfaces to get rid of odors and discoloration from thousands of burning cigarettes.

There are no national hotel smoking standards. California, which prohibits smoking in hotel bars and restaurants, as well as lobbies, does not require smoking bans in guest rooms. Hotels are deciding on their own to forbid indoor smoking.

”We want to provide guests with a healthy environment and allow them to leave feeling better,” said Nadine Ayala, a spokeswoman for Westin, which operates three Bay Area properties, including San Francisco’s famed St. Francis Hotel. Besides, she said, “Our research showed that 92 percent of our guests requested smoke-free rooms.”

Government smoking restrictions have drawn the ire of smokers’ rights groups, which see the curbs as violations on individual rights. Enoch Ludlow, a former board member of Forces International, founded in San Francisco 11 years ago, said hoteliers have the right to do what they want with their property but questioned the science behind both government and business smoking bans.

“There has never been any evidence that secondhand smoke is harmful,” he said.

Westin’s parent, Starwood, based in White Plains, N.Y., has not extended its smoking ban beyond North America, where anti-smoking sentiment is strong. Nor has it banned smoking at its other hotel brands: St. Regis, W, Sheraton and recently acquired Le Meridien.

There are no plans to outlaw smoking at all of Starwood’s 864 global hotels. But the ban at the 77 Westin hotels in North America has been well received, Ayala said.

“The response has been amazing, really positive,” according to Ayala. She said Westin has received letters of thanks from travelers and kudos from medical organizations. Westin allows smoking in designated outdoor areas, she said.

Ayala said the company now saves money by not having to clean smokers’ rooms, but did not provide dollar amounts. Westin had 3,900 smoking rooms in North America before the new policy was implemented .

Savings from smoking prohibitions can be substantial.

At luxury hotels fashioned from rich materials, a deep-cleaning of smokers’ guest rooms can cost from $5,000 to $8,000 per room per year, according to Anwar Elgonemy, a vice president at hotel industry consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle.

“Smoking affects the walls, the bed. Everything goes yellow, especially at the high end, when you have to replace the drapes,” Elgonemy said. “From the operator’s standpoint, to clean smokers’ rooms is a significant expense.”

Marriott’s impending smoking ban, which allows smokers to puff away on designated outdoor terraces but not in guest rooms or indoor public areas, was prompted by customer demand, Marriott spokesman Mark Indre said. “Ninety-five percent of our customers request nonsmoking rooms,” he said.

“Demand for nonsmoking rooms continues to rise with new information from the surgeon general on the hazards of secondary smoke,” Washington, D.C.’s Marriott International Inc. said in a statement announcing the ban.

Marriott — which operates 64 Bay Area properties, including the San Francisco Marriott, San Francisco’s J.W. Marriott, the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton and the Ritz-Carlton at Half Moon Bay — will implement its North America smoking ban across all of its brands. They include Courtyard, Fairfield Inn, Hampton Inn and ExecuStay.

“Our family of brands is united on this important health issue, and we anticipate very positive consumer feedback,” said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer J.W. Marriott Jr.

Consumer demand has already led Marriott to run about 60 hotels as smoke-free environments, Indre said. With its 2,300 North America properties and 400,000 guest rooms, Marriott will be the largest player to go nonsmoking.

Smaller boutique operators are also studying the issue.

Kimpton, which operates 40 hotels nationally, including 11 in San Francisco, is considering its smoking policies, according to Kimpton media relations specialist Jamie Law.

“Our Topaz Hotel in Washington, D.C., is a completely nonsmoking property,” Law said. “Aside from that, we’ve basically designated one floor at each property as a smoking floor. While most of our demand is for nonsmoking rooms, we do still keep some smoking rooms to meet the demands of some of our guests, primarily our European guests.”

American travelers who have visited Europe or Asia — where inhaling luxuriantly and theatrically directly underneath no-smoking signs is a common sight will not be surprised to hear that U.S. hoteliers have no plans to extend nonsmoking policies to their properties in those parts of the world anytime soon.

“The French, the Italians and Middle Easterners culturally tend to smoke more than people here,” Elgonemy said. “It might upset foreign travelers” to widen bans in this country, but otherwise “there’s not going to be much of an adverse reaction.”

Twelve of Joie de Vivre’s 34 hotels are already nonsmoking, according to company founder and CEO Chip Conley.

Conley says he leaves it to the general managers of each hotel to determine whether the local market will support a smoking ban and make policy accordingly.

“At some of our properties, smoking didn’t make sense,” Conley said. “The Hotel Vitale (in San Francisco) has a spa concept, so it’s a no-smoking hotel. That was a no-brainer.

“The White Swan Inn and Petite Auberge (also in San Francisco) are beautiful, small hotels that have great fabrics. To have all that smoking in those places wouldn’t make sense.”

However, some Joie de Vivre properties are popular with European and Asian guests. “It’s hard to ban smoking there,” Conley said. “You want to be respectful of the guests.”

Clearly, though, the trend is toward no smoking, at his company and beyond, he said.

“Right now, about a third of our company’s hotels are nonsmoking. In, say, three years, two-thirds will be nonsmoking,” Conley predicted.

E-mail David Armstrong at davidarmstrong@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/31/BUG5PKS1ON55.DTL

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQgktBR6-w

This is a Star Wars PSA about smoking. It will discuss some of the reasons why one should quit smoking.