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Health facilities giving tobacco zero tolerance

By Michael Andersen
Published: February 15, 2010, 12:00am

o Southwest Washington Medical Center: banned on almost all of campus.

o Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center: total ban since Jan. 4.

o Vancouver Housing Authority: banned at two properties last summer.

o Columbia River Mental Health: full ban starts today.

Emboldened by past successes, Clark County’s health advocates are continuing to expand their crusade against tobacco.

“You can tell people, ‘Don’t smoke. It’s bad. It causes cancer,’” county Public Health Officer Dr. Alan Melnick said at a public hearing in January. “But that only influences a small number of people.”

That’s why some institutions with health-related missions are embracing the latest trend: banning tobacco use anywhere on their property, forcing smokers onto the sidewalk and into the rain.

Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center banned all tobacco in January. Columbia River Mental Health, the county’s largest mental health clinic, is doing the same today.

o Southwest Washington Medical Center: banned on almost all of campus.

o Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center: total ban since Jan. 4.

o Vancouver Housing Authority: banned at two properties last summer.

o Columbia River Mental Health: full ban starts today.

It’s an effort to push secondhand smoke further from nonsmokers and to give mentally ill patients and staff one more reason to quit, explained Columbia River Mental Health development and communications director Pat Stryker.

“It’ll be a challenge — we know that,” Stryker said Friday. “But, typically, people with severe mental illness have life spans 20 years shorter. A lot of the chronic diseases they have are impacted by tobacco.”

The mental health clinic’s staff planned to have its two outdoor shelters torn down by this morning, Stryker said. From now on, smokers and chewers will have to walk the 50 yards or so to the sidewalk south or west of the property.

Tobacco users staying at the clinic’s residential facility, Elahan Place, will now have to walk off-site, too.

‘Still going to do it’

Any attempt to stop mental health patients from smoking is “insane,” said Sandra Gadberry of Vancouver, 38.

“People are still going to do it,” Gadberry said, smoking a cigarette outside Columbia River Mental Health’s clinic Friday. “The more you ban it, the more people will smoke.”

Statistics don’t support Gadberry’s belief. Only 15 percent of Washington adults now smoke, down from 21 percent in 2000 and 18 percent in 2007, according to the state Department of Health.

Tobacco foes credit Washington’s relatively steep $2.025-per-pack cigarette tax, its 1994 workplace smoking ban and its 2006 bar smoking ban.

“I think it has more to do with the taxes than the bans,” Gadberry said.

Gadberry said that without knowing about the ban, she’d made plans that Friday would be her final day of smoking. She’d tried to quit several times before, she said.

Smoking a cigarette beside her mother in the Columbia River Mental Health shelter, Gadberry’s daughter said she, too, wants to quit, for health reasons.

Gadberry asked that the newspaper not use her daughter’s name, because she is under 18.

Trend among clinics

If you have a mental illness, you’re far more likely to be a smoker.

One study found that in 1991 and 1992, people with a recently diagnosed mental illness were almost twice as likely to smoke as people without mental illness.

Stryker said it’s probably in part because people with mental issues “self-medicate” with tobacco, which acts as a relaxant.

Some say this means people with mental illness need even stronger nudges not to smoke.

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“Is it OK for people who have mental health issues to die from tobacco use?” county Public Health Director John Wiesman asked at last month’s hearing before the county commissioners. “Is that somehow OK? It’s not.”

Columbia River Mental Health started planning for today’s tobacco ban last year because the state Department of Social and Health Services said it would no longer give a certain grant to institutions that allowed tobacco use on their properties.

In December, Stryker said, they were told that state Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office had nixed the new grant requirement, saying legislative action was necessary.

Columbia River decided to push forward with it anyway, Stryker said.

“I would say most health facilities, both physical and mental health facilities, are on this path or are already there,” she said.

Supporting the decision was “a lot of medical evidence” that nicotine can lessen the effects of mental health medications, Stryker said.

“Most of our clients are not here at the main clinic for more than an hour or two,” she said. “They won’t like it … but it won’t be an undue hardship.”

Michael Andersen: 360-735-4508 or michael.andersen@columbian.com.

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