Sunday, June 11, 2006 | 7:33 a.m.
I have always thought of myself as a liberal on the issue of smoking. It only seems fair that people could smoke wherever they wanted - as long as they held all the smoke in their lungs. That way, people who need their nicotine could have it and I, along with all the other nonsmokers in the world would not have to smell tobacco.
But, of course, the world is more complicated. Stand under any overhang at the edge of any building that forbids smoking and you find the smokers' enclave. Clustered in clumps, smokers enjoy their almost-forbidden pleasure, leaving the distinct aroma of their presence after they finish. I for one instinctively flinch and hold my nose as I approach such places, knowing full well that the smell of stale tobacco will soon hit me in the face.
Casinos are different. They allow smoking, the best of them pulling the smoke from the air as if by magic. Even though people are smoking around you, you never smell it unless you are in the immediate vicinity of a lit cigarette. The next day, when you sniff your clothes, you can always smell the smoke, but while you are there, the world seems smoke-free.
The prevalence of smoking is part of being in Nevada, the nation's closest thing to a libertarian state. We have always allowed more here, first as economic necessity and then as habit. In Nevada, you remain free in the late 20th-century version of the term: You can do what you want, where you want, how you want and with whomever you want. Paul Revere might not recognize this as freedom, but generations of Nevadans have.
That may be about to change. The Nevada Indoor Clean Air Act proposes to make it illegal to smoke in restaurants, bars and other places that serve food. Casinos are exempted. This is a first in Nevada, an effort to regulate personal behavior that is not illegal. Modeled on a counterpart measure in California, the legislation would fundamentally change the way we do business in the Silver State.
Smoke-free works. California's bars and restaurants are a pleasure. You can sit for hours, never getting a whiff of tobacco - until you leave the building and find the smokers crowded under the overhang. On a certain level, we trade a smoke-free indoors for a smoke-filled outdoors.
A recent judicial ruling expands the range of the Nevada Indoor Clean Air Act, however, to include hotel and motel rooms as places where smoking is forbidden. If anything guarantees the failure of this measure at the polls, it is this ruling. It goes too far from the basic default of what Nevada means to persuade the voters. While we may be willing to regulate the spaces in which the public socializes, we are not yet ready to regulate a transaction between a willing lessor and a willing tenant.
But the measure and the court ruling are a portent of things to come. The state has changed, and the old Nevada is outnumbered by the new, by a ratio of somewhere between 5 and 7 to 1. So many people have moved here that they have been like a huge wave on a sand castle. You can see the outline of what was, but the clear picture of what it was is obscured.
A new Nevada is constantly forming, and its values are shaped in other places and translated here. There is much of the old anti-institutional vision in newcomers, but even more of them are suburban with the expectations of suburbanites. Retirees present another version of the new Nevada, as do Hispanics.
I fully expect the Nevada Indoor Clean Air Act to fail, in no small part because of the ruling this past week. It might make sense to the public to make bars and restaurants smoke-free, but hotel and motel rooms offer a different vision that I doubt Nevadans will embrace.
Pass or fail, such legislation will continue to come. Nevada has changed, and the old core who self-selected for an institution-free life in the Silver State is now a minority in its own paradise.
Even more, Nevada's traditions and its future are on a collision course, with the demands of the new Nevada, sometimes for government service, other times for regulation of behavior like smoking and nude dancing, at odds with the way things have always been done here. How we work out this particular tension will tell a great deal about the future of the Silver State.
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