ntributed to a trend already started by medical professionals and others convinced of the need. Business took up the cudgels because of the belief that it would be more cost-effective to do so. As fewer people smoked and the message proliferated, non-smokers began demanding more and more rights, more and more accommodations, and less and less smoke in their environment. Today, the country is at a point where government regulation may indeed be superfluous because people already seem to want a smoke-free environment and are pressing for it with their economic clout, their bargaining power, and their political and social will. The case of cigarette smoking shows how a close connection may develop between governmental action and a developing culture, with each influencing the other to produce a changed consensus, a call for further action in both spheres, and a completely changed social scene. This can be seen by observation, as Shannon Brownlee notes:
Take a walk though the business district of any American city, and the scene is the same. Winter or summer, rain or shine, there are people lounging outside office buildings smoking cigarettes. They are modern pariahs, banished by their employers to protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke (Brownlee, 1994, 66). There is also a danger in having the government make these decisions, a danger encountered with other recent claims of environmental hazard. The recent alar scare is an example, a drug used in the growing of apples that was first claimed to be a potential health hazard and that was then found not to be a hazard at all. While it is more certain that smoking causes a variety of health problems, it is less certain that second-hand smoke does much the same thing for some people, and indeed there are those who believe the evidence is insufficient or that it is at least not strong eno
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