Public Health Policy NEOLIBERAL AND PUBLIC HEALTH EFFECTS OF FAILING TO ADOPT OSHA’S NATIONAL SECONDHAND TOBACCO SMOKE RULE

From the early 1980s to the present, neoliberal doctrine has called for govern-ment policies of privatization, funding cutbacks, and deregulation of public health and other domestic social programs in the belief that the market rather than the public sector can best organize and distribute crucial societal services. Proponents of a neoliberal and deregulatory mixed approach of command and control and self-regulation argue this approach provides the most adequate means to conduct regulation in the legalistic and adversarial U.S. regulatory process. In April 1994, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a proposed rule to eliminate tobacco smoking in most workplace rooms, arguing secondhand tobacco smoke annually killed up to 13,700 nonsmokers. The tobacco industry purposely delayed public hearing procedures (later halted altogether by Congress and the president) primarily to advance unhindered private property rights and profits rather than sub-mitting to a public command-and-control regulatory framework to reduce deaths due to secondhand tobacco smoke. Since the 1930s, when the modern American administrative state emerged and expanded with the programs of the New Deal and Great Depression, Congress has increasingly delegated policy discretion to agencies such as the Occupa-tional Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to implement public policy and legislation, such as banning secondhand tobacco smoke in workplaces through written regulations (1–13). (Secondhand tobacco smoke, in this article, is defined as “side stream smoke released from the smouldering cigarette or other smoking device (cigar, pipe, bidi, etc.) and diluted with ambient air ” (4).) However, since the early 1980s, neoliberal doctrine has called for a reversal of the size and scope of the administrative state through government policies of privatization, fundin