Inspectors express frustration with smoking ban

The nationwide ban on smoking indoors in public areas, imposed two years ago, lacks specific regulations on how to enforce the law, health officials from four regions said in a conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

According to a 2011 law - called the Implementation Rules on Regulations on Public Places Sanitation Administration - by the Ministry of Health, smoking is banned in indoor public places, such as restaurants, hotels and movie theaters. Signs must be posted in public places to warn smokers of the ban and workers are obliged to stop any smokers they see.

One drawback, however, is that the ban doesn't define how local health officials should levy fines or mete out punishments for violations.

An organization under the Ministry of Health launched a pilot program last year to find out how business owners in Heilongjiang, Shandong, Gansu provinces and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region are imposing the smoking ban. However, in a survey, the organization discovered that 64 percent of 425 restaurants and 40.5 percent of 425 hotels in the four regions said they don't have restrictions on smoking indoors.

Many of the managers interviewed said they feared that smoking customers would oppose an indoor smoking ban. More than 72 percent of restaurants and 40 percent of hotels were found to have customers smoking indoors.

In Tianshui, Gansu province, when a business applies for a basic hygiene certificate, it is required to sign a promise to ban smoking indoors. It must also submit a plan to maintain hygiene, including how they will work to control tobacco use, said Liu Jiong, an official of Gansu's health inspection department.

"Local health inspectors have fined some business owners when they failed to maintain the ban, but there is no specification on how to punish violators," Liu said. "It's a problem for many health inspectors because they don't have legislation to turn to."

Yue Yulan, deputy director of the health inspection institution of Qiqihar, Heilongjiang province, agreed.

Yue said the kind of punishment she and her colleagues have the power to impose on business owners is limited to administrative warnings. They can also order business owners to improve their control of the use of tobacco indoors within a certain period of time.

But, Yue said, there is no further punishment if the business owner fails to follow their orders.

"The punishment right now is too light and doesn't financially influence violators," she said.

Xie Yang, an official from the comprehensive inspection bureau under the National Health and Family Planning Commission, believed that punishment alone won't root out the problem.

"Tobacco control requires long-term efforts. Punishment doesn't necessarily lead to a significant improvement," she said. "The habit of smoking in public can only be changed if there is also education and advocacy in the long run."

This year, the State Council listed a separate regulation to combat smoking in public places on its priority of legislations to be discussed, meaning that national legislation for tobacco control may come out in the near future.