Tempe's latest smoking ban is 'surpassingly futile'

• In May%2C Tempe and Kingman both enacted laws forbidding people with kids in their car from smoking
• The biggest problem with campaigns to enforce health standards through ordinance is burden they place on cops
• New York Mayor Bloomberg's anti-Big Gulp campaign collapsed under campaign of mockery and court orders

Coming down hard on foolish laws enacted by morally superior politicians invariably requires disclaimers. Here's ours:

No, we don't approve of parents smoking around their kids.

In fact, we will go one better: No one around our editorial table smokes cigarettes. Or much enjoys being in the vicinity of those who do. And in our perfect world we'd rather no one did.

But we don't live in a perfect world. And by enacting a surpassingly futile and oppressive law that distracts police from truly important duties, the Tempe City Council inadvertently has made its own less-than-perfect world slightly more imperfect. Put that in your e-cigarette and smoke it.

In May, the Tempe council banned adults from smoking in cars carrying children. The measure would carry a $50 first-offense fine and $100 fines for subsequent violations.

The ordinance is the brainchild of former state lawmaker David Schapira, who pushed a similar state law in the Legislature. It is a second-tier offense law, meaning an officer first must have another reason for pulling over a smoker and citing her.

So only the children of lousy cigarette-smoking drivers are imperiled in Tempe? Is that it? While even the most fiendishly intense smoker-drivers get a good-driver pass? Hardly seems right.

Schapira, et al, have let their sense of crusade cloud their judgment — as evidenced by the inclusion of e-cigarettes, a device that does not actually "light up," and about which there is scant evidence to date that it emits harmful chemicals. The Tempe council is at loggerheads over banning texting while driving — a truly distracting, dangerous practice — but smoking while transporting kids? They're all over it.

The biggest problem with such ordinances (Kingman has the same law on its books) is the burden of enforcement it places on the police, who have a great many serious issues on their plates already.

Schapira clearly would like to find a way to stop adults from smoking around children.

In this regard, he stands on the shoulders of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his crusades against sugary Big Gulp-style drinks, and President Obama's Food and Drug Administration, which recently told the food industry of its intent to ban partially hydrogenated oils, aka trans fats, from processed foods.

There are downsides to all these missions.

Bloomberg's anti-Big Gulp crusade collapsed under the weight of widespread mockery and court orders striking down his overreach. As for the FDA's trans-fat campaign, environmental groups fear that a ban on artificial trans fats will cause Big Food to turn to palm oil, which the greens link to widespread deforestation and human-rights abuses.

Maybe the consequences of the driving-while-smoking ban in Tempe will be more subdued. But the ban itself is just as pointless as the Big Gulp ban. Adults who smoke with kids in the car are going to smoke in their homes, too.

Adults do a lot of things around their kids that are detrimental to children's health. Some of them are worthy of intervention.

Smoking while driving is not one of them. Tempe should let its cops focus on truly threatening behavior, not Bloomberg-ian annoyances.