How Minnesota led the way on smoking restrictions – and what that says about the state today

By 1989, Ann Rest smoked more than two packs a day of Carlton cigarettes. 

“I was a very heavy smoker,” the longtime DFL state lawmaker from New Hope said. “I started in high school and got addicted by college.”

While studying in graduate school for an accounting test, “I was sure I was going to fail,” Rest said, so she began to think about what in her life she could control. 

And so she began the hellish process of quitting smoking cold turkey. Soon after that, Rest joined a legion of lawmakers who dramatically reduced secondhand smoke and youth access to cigarettes in Minnesota. (Rest said she got a B on the test.)

This August marks the 50th anniversary of the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act going into effect. According to the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, this was the first state law to require indoor public places to have no smoking areas.

Minnesota was also the first state to spend money on a media campaign to discourage smoking. And in the 1990s, it was early to sue tobacco companies and conduct sting operations against retailers selling cigarettes to minors, brought about by legislation that Rest authored as a member of the Minnesota House. 

“Minnesota was a pioneer of the tobacco control movement in the United States,” concluded the tobacco control group.

Why is this history lesson relevant today?

Because Minnesota continues to be an outlier on public health policies, including expanding Medicaid and MinnesotaCare and pouring cold water on efforts to permit sports betting. 

“Minnesota has always been known as a very health-conscious state,” said state Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville.

Here is what to know about Minnesota’s crusade against tobacco and its present day analogues. 

The Good Life of not smoking

The 1970s may be associated with the rise of narcissism and individualism, but in Minnesota, the state was getting recognized for its quality of life and community spirit. In 1973, Time magazine placed a picture of Gov. Wendell Anderson holding a fish on its cover with the headline, “The Good Life in Minnesota.”

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As Dane Smith wrote for MinnPost last year, the accompanying Time story “described a veritable Camelot in Middle America’s flyover land,” distinguished by “civic health.”

It was in 1973 that former Minnesota House member Edward Brandt, R-Minneapolis, worked to create the Association for Non-Smokers Rights. Brandt wanted to restrict indoor smoking because he, quite literally, had grown sick of legislative dealmaking in smoke-filled rooms. 

“I tried desperately to find a place where I’d be free from it, but it didn’t work,” Brandt told the Associated Press at the time, per the tobacco control group study. 

The Non-Smokers Rights group first made waves by partnering with the Minnesota State Medical Association to urge some restrictions on smoking in hospitals. Then in 1975, tobacco control advocates worked with Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, on a bill stating that, “No person shall smoke in a public place or a public meeting except in designated smoking areas.”

Gov. Anderson, he of the caught fish, signed the bill into law.

Minnesota pressed on with various firsts in the 1980s, including the first state to develop a comprehensive tobacco control plan and the first to have billboards and commercials encouraging people not to smoke. 

This campaign included the Minnesota Department of Health putting out a poster of a deer, dog, duck and pig with cigarettes in their mouths and the tagline, “It looks just as stupid when you do it.”

Public health theater

In 1994, Minnesota Attorney General Hubert “Skip” Humphrey III and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota sued tobacco manufacturers for violating state laws against consumer fraud and deceptive advertising. 

Minnesota was not quite the first state to sue cigarette companies (that would be Mississippi), but it was one of four states (including Mississippi) to go to trial instead of reaching a settlement of around $4 billion. Instead, right before the jury deliberated, tobacco companies hammered out an agreement to pay Minnesota $6.5 billion. 

While Humphrey prosecuted tobacco makers, the Legislature targeted retailers. Rest sponsored a bill requiring compliance checks to ensure that businesses do not sell tobacco to minors. 

The 1997 Youth Access Bill included a stipulation that an underage person, secretly working for the state health department, would appear before vendors twice a year. Rest said it took three years to get her bill passed into law, blaming the delay on creative opposition from tobacco companies.

“Big tobacco had a very interesting way of exerting influence,” Rest recalled. “They would very seldom testify publicly but instead they used surrogates like gas station owners.”

The last major piece of tobacco legislation was the 2007 Freedom to Breathe Act, which sailed through the Legislature with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty. The act effectively banned indoor smoking in public places, including workplaces and public transit. 

However! 

The Guthrie Theater and other performing arts centers successfully lobbied for an exemption to let thespians smoke if it was part of a play. 

The play caveat prompted one of the zanier periods in Minnesota public health history in which rogue bars provided scripts to customers who wanted to smoke. An early part of the script usually read something to the effect of, “Patron takes a drag.”

“The scripts had been crafted by some guy who owned a bar someplace,” said John Linc Stine, who is now retired and served in the aughts as director of environmental health at the Minnesota Department of Health. “It was a lot of simple dialogue and the script saying, ‘He lights up.’”

Not just finding fault in the script’s rote character development, the health department began to issue $1,000 fines for each instance of these bars permitting smoking via an ostensible play performance.

Watering holes including Tank’s Bar in Babbitt challenged the fines in court, arguing that the theater exemption was “vague.” However, a lower court judge and court of appeals panel found that Tank’s “Gun Smoke Monologues” night violated the Freedom to Breathe Act. 

“In these cases there was almost no debate,” Linc Stine said. “I’ve been a regulator my whole career. It was the easiest regulatory win.” 

Vaping, toking and gambling

Asked what public debate today compares to the smoking laws adopted decades ago, Rest first mentioned vaping. 

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced a $60.5 million settlement in 2023 with e-cigarette companies Juul and Altria on charges including deceptive advertising. Rest has supported legislation to restrict vaping but also wonders if it is smart to curb it as much as old-fashioned cigarettes.

Related: Addressing menthol cigarette usage, vaping, highlights policy inequities

“Some folks have found it very helpful to quit smoking cigarettes,” she said. 

Another point of comparison is marijuana legalization, Rest said.

Minnesota is moving in many directions at once with marijuana policy. The state has picked up the pace in doling out dispensary licenses. But it also increased the cannabis tax 50% in the last legislative session, and banned smoking weed not just in indoor public places but also in multifamily dwelling units. 

According to Marty, the clearest connection to the smoking battles of yesteryear is sports gambling. 

This may seem counterintuitive. Cigarette smoking was once socially accepted but no longer is, while sports betting as recently as eight years ago was confined to Las Vegas, seedy bookies and off-track betting parlors, but now is legal in 38 states. 

But what they have in common is “using deceptive practices to lure children who can become heavily addicted,” Marty said, with gambling apps that allow for bets during and before games “preying on our kids.” 

Minnesota is one of the 12 states not to legalize sports gambling. Marty introduced a measure this year to legalize betting but with an extraordinary number of safeguards. The bill went nowhere. 

But a relatively more industry-friendly bill by Sen. Matt Kline, DFL-Mendota Heights, also withered on the vine. Even Kline’s proposal to merely study the legalization of sports wagers was put to bed at a Senate Taxes Committee hearing chaired by Rest. 

“We had a lot of ‘I don’t know but it’s a good idea’ in the bills that came before us,” Rest said at a hearing in May. Of those proposals, sports betting “continues to draw the most controversy.”

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Editor’s note: This article first appeared on MinnPost and was written by Matthew Blake, state government reporter for MinnPost. It is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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