Eight states, nine when Vermont joins the pack Sept. 1, have smokefree workplace laws that make no exceptions. Oregon, on the other hand, passed an Indoor Clean Air Act in 2001 that excluded bars, bowling alleys and gambling establishments – and prohibits local governments and their voters from removing those exemptions.

That needs to change.

This is not a debate about whether or not secondhand smoke is unhealthy. The Surgeon General’s report made that conclusion in 1986 and the medical evidence has been piling up ever since.

This is a fact: Secondhand smoke causes cancer in nonsmokers, reduces lung function in young children and poses a health problem that cannot be remedied simply by separating smokers from nonsmokers within the same airspace.

In other words, it’s not good enough to have smoking and nonsmoking sections in the same restaurant building. Oregon law recognizes that, which makes the exemptions all the sillier.

Oregon’s Tobacco-Free Coalition estimates that 35,000 Oregonians must work where smoking is allowed. Tobacco use is the number one preventable cause of disease and death in Umatilla County, Oregon and the United States, but the prevention is missing in most Oregon bars and bowling alleys. As long as those exemptions exist, the death and sickness caused by tobacco will be higher than it need be.

Usually at about this point in the argument smoking advocates stress that cigarettes are legal, and smokers deserve to have places they can smoke while socializing, especially traditionally smokey arenas like bars. That flies in the face of the democratic principles that have guided this nation, the notion that one person’s rights only extend as far as another’s begin. The freedom to smoke should not include the freedom to give others cancer.

Health advocates are not trying to ban tobacco use. They’re seeking to restrict tobacco use to protect innocent people, the same way society restricts alcohol use to protect people from drunk drivers or disorderly conduct.

We admire businesses that go beyond the law to protect their patrons, such as Desert Lanes bowling alley in Hermiston, which just went smokefree. Despite what the tobacco industry and restaurant association say, studies in California, New York and elsewhere have clearly shown that banning smoking does not hurt business at bars and bowling alleys and usually ends up bolstering it.

That’s because most adults are nonsmokers. About 21 percent of Oregon adults smoke. They should not be able to endanger the vast majority who don’t.