ANDERSON — When Anderson City Council’s Health Committee discusses the smoking ban ordinance it will present to the council next month, it will have to take several opinions into account.

Since the committee presented a draft of the ordinance to the council in June, two camps have broken off in not supporting the act, which would ban smoking in public places in Anderson. One, consisting of Anderson advocacy group Healthy, Tobacco-Free Madison County, Saint John’s Health System and Community Hospital, has expressed concerns with the ordinance because it said it wasn’t comprehensive enough and offered too many exemptions.

A more recent group, represented by concerned resident Al Faunce, doesn’t believe the ordinance is necessary because Faunce said his research shows that secondhand smoke is not dangerous.

“The poison is in the dose,” Faunce said. “We could literally find hundreds of things around our house that if we took in a large enough dose we would be poisoned. Second-hand smoke is not a health risk to anybody that doesn’t have the risk already, and any other kind of smoke would make it a risk too.”

At Thursday’s City Council meeting, Faunce presented information he researched that he said suggested no one has ever been documented of dying from secondhand smoke, and he challenged City Council members to find someone in Madison County who had.

“I guarantee you they won’t do it,” Faunce said.

Faunce also presented a petition to the council with 2,139 names of community members against a smoking ban.

“We will look at that because those are signatures of some people who are against the proposed ordinance,” said Councilman Rodney Chamberlain, who also is on the Health Committee. “We definitely have to consider that. I’m not saying his proposal is right or wrong, but it’s something we need to look at, especially if all of those signatures are from people who live in Anderson.”

Councilman Art Pepelea Jr., who will author the ordinance for the Health Committee, does not plan to take Faunce’s presentation into consideration, however, saying he spoke for longer than his time limit at Thursday’s meeting and that the ordinance is to help children who don’t have a choice on whether they inhale secondhand smoke.

“This whole ordinance is all about trying to protect the children,” said Pepelea, who started his campaign for the ban this year when he took his grandchildren to a restaurant where the non-smoking section was not properly separated from the smoking section. “Grandkids don’t have the authority. They can’t tell their grandparent or mom and dad, “Will you take me out of this room?”

Faunce, a non-smoker, researched the effects of secondhand smoke when he started hearing agencies claim it caused death.

“I’m not one to just accept something at face value,” he said. “I have been around the block enough to know you don’t believe everything you hear.”

Faunce used studies from prominent doctors, such as Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, and Dr. Richard Doll, who first linked active smoking to lung cancer. Both said the secondhand smoke’s effects are minimal and have not been known to cause death or lung cancer, Faunce said.

“There are many things secondhand smoke can hurt, but so can smoke from your burn barrel, smoke from your barbecue, pollen,” Faunce said. “The famous thing is to blame it on secondhand smoke when you don’t have anything else to blame it on.”

Pepelea hopes to have the ordinance written this week for review by the Health Committee, which will discuss the issue and can make changes before the ordinance is presented to the City Council for its first reading Sept. 11.