FRANKFORT, Ky. — When Dr. Ralph Alvarado was elected to the Kentucky state Senate in 2014, he found that his new colleagues had something in common with most of his patients: They knew smoking was bad, they just couldn’t quit.
For more than two years, Alvarado has led the effort to restrict smoking in a state with the highest smoking rate in the country.
But his efforts have so far been thwarted by the cultural legacy of tobacco, which maintains its grip on public policy in Kentucky.
Banning smoking in public places is still a politically perilous position for most of the state’s Republican lawmakers, whose constituents view it as an attack on their personal freedoms.
Alvarado — also a Republican — is insulated from this, even though his district includes parts of rural Montgomery and Clark counties where he says smoking bans are met with scowls.
‘‘The comments from people [are], ‘Well what do you expect, he’s a doctor.’ And so I’m almost excused,’’ he said.
State lawmakers have focused most of their attention to the state’s rising death toll from drug overdoses, including opioids, which killed more than 1,200 people last year. During that same time period, more than 8,800 Kentuckians died from tobacco-related illnesses, according to Shawn Jones, past president of the Kentucky Medical Association.
Kentucky had more tobacco-related cancer cases per 100,000 people than any other state, according to a study from 2009 to 2013 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Alvarado’s first attempts to ban smoking failed. In 2015, he angered his Republican colleagues when he joined Democrats in an attempt to force a vote on a statewide workplace smoking ban.
Last year, Alvarado sponsored a similar bill that had the support of at least one major tobacco company and a promise of indifference from other tobacco interests. But he could not persuade a majority of Republican senators to bring the bill to the Senate floor for a vote.
Alvarado has since narrowed the legislation and is trying again.
Associated Press
