As Smoke Clears, Tobacco Maker Opens Lounge

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/19/news/chicago.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/national/19smoke.html

January 19, 2006
As Smoke Clears, Tobacco Maker Opens Lounge
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO, Jan. 18 - The room is lined with vintage ashtrays, delicate lighters, matches and pens shaped like cigarettes. The scent, naturally, is of smoke.

Chicago's smoking ban took effect this week, but it was hard to know that from inside the gleaming lounge along Milwaukee Avenue in a hip neighborhood on the North Side. Here, under glass, are thick jars of tobacco - Oriental Rose, The Empress, The Earl - poured lovingly into white smoking papers by tobacco's answer to the coffee shop barista.

At the very moment smokers around Chicago were learning not to light up on train platforms, in sports stadiums and in some restaurants, a subsidiary of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was preparing for the grand opening on Thursday of its answer to the smoke-free set: the Marshall McGearty Tobacco Lounge, what its creators intend to be the nation's first upscale, luxury lounge dedicated to the smoking of cigarettes, especially a new R. J. Reynolds variety.

The timing, Brian Stebbins, a senior marketing director at R. J. Reynolds, said, was purely coincidental. And the shop, he insists, does not fall under the city's new ban since it fits the exempt category of a "tobacco retail store," even though it also sells alcoholic drinks, cheese plates and espresso drinks.

"That's incidental," Mr. Stebbins said, as he wandered the lounge on Wednesday, pointing out the dark wood, the marble bar, the cozy seats by a fireplace. "This is about a select, super premium brand of cigarettes, just like what we've seen with the super premium tier of beer, wine, chocolate and pastries. It's about elegance and having fun."

Not so much fun for those here who fought for the smoking ban - one of the growing number of such restrictions around the country - who said they found the lounge puzzling, disconcerting and possibly illegal.

"This is not what I intended," Alderman Ed Smith, who led efforts to pass the ordinance here, said Wednesday. "I am going to have to make some calls to find out if it's really allowed."

Some antismoking advocates nationally said they worried that the Chicago store might mark a new front in the tobacco industry's efforts to market their products as glamorous, particularly to a young, cutting-edge audience, despite efforts by the industry to comply with a 1998 settlement agreement with scores of states that limits advertising.

"It's trying to get an 18-to-25 demographic here, to make smoking seem desirable, attractive, like a secret club," said Bronson Frick, associate director for Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, a group based in Berkeley, Calif.

Regardless, on Wednesday afternoon, Sean Fahey, 29, wandered by, stood at the smoking bar and sucked deeply and quizzically on his first Oriental Rose - a step up, he said, from his plain old Camels. (The Marshall McGearty cigarettes are sold by the pack for $8, about $2 more than most commercial brands, and carry the customary warning.)

"More and more places like this are sure to open up," Mr. Fahey said. "No one is going to stop smoking because of a ban, but maybe people can start treating cigarettes like this more like alcohol - the kind of thing you savor."

That was just the image the creators of Marshall McGearty might have had in mind two years ago, when they began dreaming up the mixes of leaves (nine types described in a glossy lounge guide, a menu for cigarettes, in three categories, "light and smooth," "mellow and flavorful," or "rich and full-bodied") and, of course, dreaming up ways to market such an idea.

The name, the lounge's press release says, was the "brainchild" of a partnership between Jerry Marshall, a "senior staff blends specialist" in R. J. Reynolds' research and development department, and Larry McGearty, a creative director at Gyro Worldwide, a Philadelphia advertising agency that has handled tobacco accounts.

The partnership, like everything else about this brand, was portrayed as having an aura of mystique. "And with that idea," the press release said of the two men, "they set out to make some of the world's best smokes and to build unique sanctuaries where their works of art could be properly enjoyed."

But how, precisely, was such a sanctuary allowed in a city that had just finished its argument over where to ban smoking?

As part of a compromise agreement among the city's aldermen, the ordinance ultimately included provisions that allowed bars and restaurants with bars to delay putting the rule into effect until July 1, 2008. And it included language to exempt a business that can prove its ventilation system is so efficient that its inside air is as clean as the air outside.

But the lounge, Mr. Stebbins said, is relying on a different exemption. Chicago's ordinance excludes "retail tobacco stores," places where 65 percent of the sales are of "tobacco" or "tobacco accessories," according to the city's Law Department. Many cities include similar exemptions in their smoking ordinances, including New York, where sales of tobacco at exempted stores must account for more than half of sales.

In the past, though, here and in other places, "retail tobacco stores" had usually referred to places like mom-and-pop tobacco shops or old-fashioned cigar shops, experts in other cities said. "Come to think of it, I guess they could do this in New York," said Russell Sciandra, director of the Center for a Tobacco Free New York. "But if customers are buying liquor and food, that starts to add up fast and that can't become the bulk of what they are selling."

The managers of the lounge said they were not worried: people would mostly come here to buy cigarettes, they said. What is more, only those 21 years or older will be allowed in - one of many ways, they said, that the lounge does not violate the 1998 settlement agreement.

"We are very serious to make sure we are complying, all with a goal to make sure we are not directly or indirectly advertising to minors," said Carole Crosslin, director of communications at R. J. Reynolds.

Several antismoking advocates said the lounge, indeed, seemed to comply with the legal terms of the settlement, though some said they wondered whether it was truly meeting the intent of the agreement.

"Glamorizing tobacco use will encourage young people who are smokers to continue doing so, and it will encourage some young people who don't smoke to do so - just because it's a glamorous, upscale place," said William V. Corr, executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "The question of whether this appeals to youth is a factual question we will have to watch."

But Richard A. Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern University and president of the Tobacco Control Resource Center, said he was not bothered by the lounge, mostly because he believes the idea will not work.

"It's a gimmick," he said. "I certainly would be surprised if it's still in business five years from now. The problem is that their clientele is not this, but mainly working class and poor people."

For his part, Mr. Stebbins said he had not considered whether such smoking lounges might move elsewhere too. "I'm focusing on Chicago right now," he said.

Across the room, Bob Kittrell, 45, sat smoking.

"This is my place now," said Mr. Kittrell, who lives nearby. "It's the only place around that I can drink coffee and read the papers and smoke my cigarettes anymore."

He was, in fact, smoking his own cigarettes, a box of ordinary Camels, but said he might try the Marshall McGearty mix sometime.