That empty ashtray on your desk. Ornamental? Reminder of a bad habit conquered? Or evidence of criminal intent?
In New York it could be all three and you would be well advised to get rid of it before department of health inspectors slap you with a fine of up to US$2,000.
Under the city's strict anti-smoking regulations, ashtray possession is a risky business, even if you are a non-smoker or the receptacle in question has never snuffed a cigarette butt.
Brooklyn video-store owner Marty Arno claims he was actually trying to help enforce the ban when he produced an ashtray so that a customer, who had walked in off the street smoking, could put out his cigarette.
Two health inspectors who visited the store the same day in October saw it differently and ticketed Arno for having "one ashtray with cigarette butt, and ashes" on his counter.
Another ticket recipient was John Martello, the executive director of the 115-year-old Players Club in Manhattan, which was raided by inspectors in November.
Martello was out of the office at the time, as was his assistant.
"When my assistant returned, the inspectors demanded she open my locked office. Of course, she was intimidated, and indeed opened the office," Martello said.
"There behind the desk, on a low shelf, they found three stacked ashtrays. No cigarettes, nothing. No evidence of smoke, just three stacked ashtrays. I wasn't even there."
The regulation in question is part of the Smoke-Free Air Act that the city adopted earlier this year.
While public attention has focused on the act's ban on smoking in all New York restaurants and bars, many missed the fine print that said ashtrays "shall not be used or provided for use" in any place where smoking is prohibited.
Of the roughly 2,300 summonses issued since the act was properly enforced on May 1, just over 200 have been for ashtray violations.
The highest profile felon has been Graydon Carter, editor of the glossy magazine Vanity Fair, whose offices were found to contain a sizeable stash of illicit ashtrays.
"I keep them around to remind me of my youth," Carter told the New York Times, adding that the ashtrays had not been used and did not have cigarette butts in them when the offices were raided.
"Any city that allows you to keep a loaded gun in your office but not an ashtray is one with its priorities seriously out of whack," Carter said.
The rationale behind the ashtray rule, according to Elliott Marcus, a deputy-commissioner at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, was that ashtrays are "an invitation" to smoke.
"The theory was that if you had no ashtrays available for smokers, the law would be self-enforcing," Marcus said. "That's been borne out by the fact that we have a 98 percent compliance rate throughout the city, except for wise guys."
While acknowledging that the law does not require evidence that the ashtray had been used, Marcus said all ashtray summonses issued so far had followed specific complaints of people using them to smoke.
"Put it this way. If someone has an ornamental ashtray with paper clips in it, we wouldn't cite them," he said.
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