BY Kim Genardo
NBC17
RALEIGH, N.C. — The rush is on to lose weight and stop smoking.

During the State Employees 2009 Health and Wellness Expo at the North Carolina Fairgrounds Wednesday, among the most crowded booths — weight loss plans, fitness memberships and healthy eating options.

State workers and those covered under the State Health Plan will pay higher premiums next July if they don’t kick the habit.

Then the following year, July 2011, those deemed overweight will pay more too.

Molly Taylor who helped organize the expo said weight loss is all the talk when she’s working in the state auditor’s office.

“We have some wives who are helping their husbands loose weight cause they didn’t do it for any other reason, but now that it’s going to cost them money the husbands will loose the weight,” said Taylor.

Gov. Bev Perdue spoke to the crowd and encouraged them all to become role models.

She told the crowd she lost nearly 100 pounds in the 1990s, she gave up smoking in 2003, and now she exercises everyday and must manage her high blood pressure.

“I just decided I could control my own destiny.  If state employees want to do that, I’m here to cheer them on. But again, this is personal, nobobdy can make you do it. It’s something you have to decide to do,” said Perdue.

But what about those who are not as motivated? Eventually they’ll be paying more for their health coverage. Lawmakers approved changes to the plan during the budget session.

“The health plan is done by the General Assembly and someday I’m hopeful to have that changed. I’ve never been a fan of how decisions are made for premium changes,” said Perdue.

The health plan covers 667,000 state employees and teachers.

Lawmakers will consider a renewal in 2011.

RALEIGH, N.C. — Apparently, state legislators don’t spend much time in hookah bars.

At least not the members of a House judiciary committee, which spent more than an hour yesterday debating the practice known as hookah smoking – a method of inhaling flavored tobacco through a long pipe, known as a hookah, which cools the smoke by drawing it through a bowl of water.

One legislator wanted to know if all of the “paraphernalia” used for hookah smoking is legal.

Another legislator joked that she had heard of topless bars before, but not hookah bars.

Despite their alien status around the General Assembly, about 20 hookah bars or lounges exist in North Carolina, mainly around college campuses. And they’re at risk of going out of business under the state’s recently passed law banning smoking in bars and restaurants.

The smoking ban will take effect in January. Before that happens, some legislators want to amend the ban by creating an exemption in the law that would allow existing hookah bars to continue to allow smoking.
State Rep. Cullie Tarleton, D-Watauga, is trying to get the exemption passed in the House. Tarleton was a strong supporter of the original smoking ban, but he said yesterday that the ban’s impact on hookah bars was unintended.

The trouble for Tarleton and supporters of hookah is that getting the exemption passed will require the legislature to revisit one of the most contentious bills of the year. And there’s not much time – depending on what happens with state budget negotiations, the 2009 legislative session could be in its final days.

“I am not interested in opening Pandora’s box here,” Tarleton said yesterday. “All I want to do is to save some 20 small businesses across the state that opened legally, legitimately, with the full intention of serving a population. (The smoking ban) is going to shut them down, and that’s an unintended consequence.”
The smoking ban – signed into law by Gov. Bev Perdue on May 19 – already contains an exemption for cigar bars, which get most of their revenue from the sale of cigars. But it has no such exemption for hookah.
Tarleton’s bill would allow existing hookah bars to continue to allow hookah smoking, but it would not allow any new hookah bars to open.

The House judiciary committee added a further restriction yesterday – it amended the bill to require that hookah bars that sell alcohol could not admit anyone under age 21. Hookah supporters said that amendment isn’t fair, because many other establishments are allowed to serve alcohol while still allowing patrons who are under 21.

About half of the state’s hookah establishments currently have permits to sell alcohol.

After adding the age-restriction requirement, the judiciary committee narrowly approved Tarleton’s bill. It now goes to the floor of the House.

Anti-smoking advocates and some social conservatives oppose the exemption for hookah bars. They said that hookah smoking is just as unhealthy as cigarette smoking, and they said that hookah bars entice young people to smoke.

But hookah supporters said that people use hookahs very differently from the way they use cigarettes. Hookah smoking is usually a social experience where a group of people shares a small amount of flavored tobacco while listening to music or eating food.

“They don’t go in to get a nicotine fix,” said Connor McGrath of Boone. McGrath and Jesse Kellogg are two students at Appalachian State University who recently opened a hookah lounge. They were in Raleigh yesterday urging legislators to allow their new business, and similar businesses around the state, to stay afloat.

Tarleton has taken up their cause, calling it an issue of fairness that could save 100 jobs at the state’s 20 hookah bars.

But other legislators were much more skeptical.

“I’m getting ready to vote on something I know absolutely nothing about,” said Rep. Johnathan Rhyne,

R-Lincoln, during yesterday’s committee meeting.

“I didn’t either until two weeks ago,” Tarleton replied.

WASHINGTON  – It fell to President Barack Obama to confirm the gossip that his aides had spent weeks trying to snuff out: He still sneaks an occasional cigarette.

“There are times where I mess up,” Obama said at a White House news conference on Tuesday.

But, the president hastened to add, he never smokes in front of his young daughters and not on a daily basis. Oh, and he’s “95 percent cured.”

It was the first public acknowledgment from the president that he still hasn’t completely kicked the habit. In the past, he had alluded to his three-decades-old habit without giving direct answers.

One day after signing the nation’s toughest anti-tobacco legislation into law, Obama was asked again Tuesday about his smoking habit and came clean.

“Look, I’ve said before that as a former smoker I constantly struggle with it. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes,” Obama said. “Am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No.”

Obama has said he used to average about five cigarettes a day, although stress sometimes drove him to reach for a lighter more often. He promised his wife he’d quit if she agreed that he should run for president.

“I hate it,” Michelle Obama told CBS’ “60 Minutes” early in the presidential campaign. “That’s why he doesn’t do it anymore, I’m proud to say. I outed him – I’m the one who outed him on the smoking. That was one of my prerequisites for, you know, entering this race is that, you know, he couldn’t be a smoking president.”

Now in the White House, Obama is finding that his nicotine intake is part of the public debate – much to the president’s annoyance.

When asked Tuesday about the anti-smoking measure and his own habits, Obama scolded a reporter for thinking the question was “neat … as opposed to it being relevant to my new law.”

He said the legislation, which faced a veto threat under former President George W. Bush, was aimed at preventing young people from taking up the habit. Obama began smoking as a teenager and has been an on-again, off-again smoker ever since.

“First of all, the new law that was put in place is not about me,” Obama said. “It’s about the next generation of kids coming up.”

Kids like his daughters, 10-year-old Malia and 8-year-old Sasha.

“I don’t do it in front of my kids, I don’t do it in front of my family,” Obama said.

Obama refused to say how many cigarettes he smokes, where he sneaks them or how often he lights up now that he’s in the White House. Only a day earlier, his top aides had refused to answer direct questions about the president’s smoking.

“I don’t, honestly, see the need to get a whole lot more specific than the fact that it’s a continuing struggle,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. “He struggles with it every day.”

During the presidential campaign, aides packed nicotine gum in their pockets to help Obama control his urges. Obama occasionally bummed cigarettes from aides, while also making sure to emphasize his efforts to stop for good and his progress toward quitting.

WASHINGTON  – President Barack Obama has signed the strongest anti-smoking measure ever, calling it an extraordinary accomplishment that will help keep children from getting hooked on cigarettes.

Standing in the Rose Garden with a number of lawmakers and other guests, Obama declared: “It is a law that will save American lives.”

The legislation gives the Food and Drug Administration unprecedented authority to regulate tobacco and cigarette marketing.

Obama himself has struggled to quit smoking. He acknowledged in his comments how difficult it can be to quit the habit.

The White House embraced the law with a sun-splashed ceremony, and the dozens of invited guests included children from the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids who were personally introduced by Obama.

By Laura Giovanelli and Michael Hewlett
JOURNAL REPORTERs
Historically and culturally, smoking and drinking go together like whiskey and water, gin and tonic, rum and Coke.

It is just after 4 on a sunny Thursday afternoon, and some of the regulars are already gathered at Finnigan’s Wake on Trade Street.

Among them is Allison Chrapek, holding forth while smoking a Pall Mall and nursing a Bud Light.
Asked how long she has smoked, one of her friends jokes that she started right out of the womb. Not quite true, Chrapek said, but she has been smoking for more than 20 years, even as the places where she is allowed to smoke have diminished.

Last week, Gov. Bev Perdue signed into law legislation that will take away something that might have once seemed, especially in tobacco country, an inalienable right – to light up with friends at a bar.

As of Jan. 2, smoking will be banned in all North Carolina restaurants and bars. The legislation marks a historic break with the state’s long and lucrative tobacco legacy. North Carolina is the first major tobacco-producing state to pass such a restrictive ban on smoking. Virginia, which passed a ban earlier, allows smoking in separately vented rooms of bars and restaurants.

Chrapek said that it doesn’t do much good to get too upset.

“It may help me quit smoking,” she said. “I know I should.”

Looking Back
Before cigarettes, it was cigars.

Customers used to offer bartenders a cigar as a friendly gesture because the bartenders weren’t supposed to drink on the job, according to Madelon Powers, a history professor at the University of New Orleans and the author of Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920.

In the 1920s, cigarette smoking grew along with the Prohibition-era speak-easies, jazz clubs and cabarets of a nightlife scene. From then on, it also became more acceptable for women to smoke in public, especially in clubs.

“There are classic photographs of jazz musicians playing from the ’40s with curls of smoke … coming up from their cigarettes as they’re getting ready to play their saxophone,” said Lewis Erenberg, a sociology professor at Loyola University Chicago.

But the curls are increasing becoming a thing of the past.

Some people who smoke in bars don’t smoke anywhere else, said David Grazian, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies nightlife culture. The smoking they do is part of their “nocturnal identities,” he said.

“This nightlife persona that they create for themselves involves a dramatic way of dressing and a very public way of behaving,” Grazian said. “And smoking has always played a part in that. It’s always been a way of performing coolness.”

Bumming a cigarette, asking for a light – these are rituals intertwined with nightlife culture, conversation starters and ice breakers.

Loopholes in Ban
It seems unthinkable that North Carolina would ban smoking in restaurants and bars, especially to people in Winston-Salem, home of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

Many people still recall when downtown smelled of tobacco because of all the manufacturing plants.
Angela Engstrom said she took up smoking 10 years ago when she flew into Winston-Salem from her native Scotland. She said she landed at the airport and just remembered that everyone was smoking.

“I found myself a pub and that was it,” she said last week, while smoking a Marlboro and sipping champagne at the West End Opera House.

Some opponents of North Carolina’s smoking ban argue that there is an apparent elitism written into the ban. Although smoking will be prohibited in all regular bars, including those that charge private-membership fees, two types of establishments are exempted: cigar bars (which must get a certain amount of their revenue from the sale of cigars) and country clubs.

That means that a wealthy smoker will still be able to enjoy a cigar at his country club, but a working stiff can’t have a cigarette at the corner bar.

The loopholes bother Lea Thulberry, the general manager at Finnigan’s Wake. She said that she doesn’t have a problem with the smoking ban, but she doesn’t understand why there are exceptions if the smoking ban was enacted, as legislators said, for health reasons. “It just feels like they’re trying to fool you,” Thulberry said.

State Rep. Hugh Holliman, the chief sponsor of the smoking-ban bill, acknowledged that the exemptions are “somewhat inconsistent.”

But Holliman, D-Davidson, said that he and other supporters of the ban had to agree to the exemptions in order to get the bill passed.

“I would have preferred to make everybody nonsmoking,” Holliman said. “In the legislature, you have to compromise.”

Number of Smokers on Decline
Whether North Carolina’s smoking ban hurts bars and restaurants won’t be known until next year. One thing to keep in mind is that smoking bans don’t necessarily get bargoers to stop smoking. They simply walk outside.

In New York, which has had a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants since 2003, the “walk outside” effect resulted in increased complaints about noise, though that might also have something to do with how dense the city’s business districts are.

Overall, however, there have been numerous studies about public-smoking restrictions, and most have found little effect on either revenue or employment at bars and restaurants.

“There’s an enormous amount of good-quality evidence in the scientific literature that demonstrates that these clean-indoor-air policies have not shown large-scale effects, or even modest effects,” said Elizabeth Klein, a professor of public health at Ohio State University. Klein recently completed a study of local smoking restrictions in Minnesota that showed no meaningful effect on employment after the restrictions were put in place.

North Carolina’s smoking ban also comes as the number of smokers has declined – 20 percent of Americans now smoke, as do 23 percent of North Carolinians. That means that smoking has become less important as a lure for bars.

The ban also could bring back people who now avoid bars because of the smoke – and the souvenir of its smell, lingering on your clothes.

Some smokers say they will still go to their favorite bars, even if they can’t light up.

But Harry Knabb, who was having a smoke last week at Finnigan’s Wake, said that the ban angers him. He said he believes that the danger of secondhand smoke has been overblown. The ban, he said, is government intruding on private business.

“I’ll come here, but I won’t stay as long,” Knabb said. “That’s where I think the erosion will happen.”

An Option for Diehards
If the image of the bar is a haze of smoke amid jazz music or sporting events, there is a positive side to the aroma of tobacco.

Take a deep sniff when you head into a nightclub after Jan. 2. In states where smoking is banned in restaurants and bars, the most prominent scent in nightclubs has become cleaning products, said Grazian, the University of Pennsylvania professor, “whereas cigarette smoke used to be able to cover up glass cleaner, which isn’t the most sensuous of fragrances.”

And what are people to do with their nondrinking hand once the ban takes effect?

Grazian said that cell phones are replacing cigarettes as the crutch of solitary bar- and clubgoers.

“It’s a device that facilitates being alone in public.”

Indeed, there’s even an app for it.

The iPhone’s Electric Smoke application allows users to puff away on a virtual cigarette, which also includes trivia about the health benefits and savings by not lighting up.

RALEIGH, N.C.  – A powerful North Carolina lawmaker who drove his colleagues to pass a statewide smoking ban has again undergone surgery to remove part of his right lung.

The legislative assistant for House Majority Leader Hugh Holliman said the Davidson County Democrat had a lower lobe of his right lung removed on Tuesday. Holliman assistant Carol Bowers said the legislator’s wife reported he is recovering in the intensive care unit of Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem.

Holliman had a cancerous lung tumor removed in September 2007. He also was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1999, and declared himself cured in 2005.

The former smoker was collecting plaudits one week ago as Gov. Beverly Perdue signed into law a ban on smoking in restaurants and bars in the state.

RALEIGH, N.C. – North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue is making an event out of a smoking ban in the state’s restaurants and bars.

Perdue on Tuesday will preside over a bill-signing ceremony in the Old House Chamber of the State Capitol Building.

The measure passed last week would allow fines of up to $50 for people who smoke after being asked to stop, and up to $200 for managers who’ve been warned twice to enforce the rules.

Perdue said last week that the smoking restrictions are a historic step to protect health in what is still the country’s biggest tobacco-growing state. She said she has vigorously supported efforts to reduce and eliminate smoking.

More than 30 states have passed similar legislation. Virginia adopted a ban in March despite its 400-year history with tobacco.

Gov. Bev Perdue will sign House Bill 2 to prohibit smoking in certain public places.  She will be joined by the legislative sponsors, DHHS Sec. Lanier Cansler, state legislators and other state officials.

The signing will take place at the Old House Chamber, State Capitol Building in Raleigh at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday.

RALEIGH, N.C. — Legislators in the country’s top tobacco-growing state have approved a smoking ban for restaurants and bars across North Carolina.The state House voted 62-56 on Wednesday to approve changes adopted in the state Senate.

Gov. Beverly Perdue has 10 days to sign the bill into law or veto it before it would become law without her signature. More than 30 states have already passed similar restrictions.

Perdue said in a statement released Wednesday that she will sign the bill.

“Today is an important and historic day for North Carolina – a day to applaud Rep. Hugh Holliman and Sen. William Purcell for protecting the health of North Carolinians,” she said. “I have vigorously supported efforts to reduce and eliminate smoking and this bill will help more North Carolina citizens avoid the dangers of secondhand smoke.”

The legislation was backed by health advocates and opposed by lawmakers from areas were tobacco-growing and cigarette factories are big employers.

Opponents including Republican Rep. David Lewis of rural Harnett County complained the ban took away the opportunity for restaurant and bar owners to decide how to run their businesses.