Just because tobacco smoking was outlawed in most bars around Wheeling 10 months ago doesn't mean nobody's lighting up. Plenty of restaurants and taverns in Ohio County, W.Va., continue to do business under a familiar, soft-gray haze.

Telling customers to stub out their smokes is economic suicide, the businessmen say -- revenues are suffering, enforcement is nonexistent and the law's not fair anyway, not as long as gamblers at the Wheeling Island Casino Tropicana Bar (owned by a state legislator) can puff away with impunity while they drop quarters into the slots. The game's not fair, so restaurateurs and bartenders aren't playing. The smokers just keep lighting up.

Ohio County is one of four West Virginia counties that ban smoking in indoor public places, including lounges, offices and eateries. Fines for violators can reach $350, but the county health departments that make the rules have only started to enforce them.

They need to uphold the law, though it's hard to criticize them from here, east of the state line. People who like clean air tried to enact tobacco bans in both Allegheny County and Pennsylvania, but their initiatives have yet to bear fruit. Some in the smoke-free states along the seaboard call Pennsylvania "the ashtray of the Northeast."

Maybe it's our shared past of smoky, dirty industry or our roots in the black-lung coal mines that keep Pennsylvanians and West Virginians puffing away regardless of rules meant to curb this vice. Never mind that smoking has for years been linked to birth defects, cancer, emphysema and heart disease as well as rotten gums, yellow teeth, sallow skin and dragon breath.

Then there's that majority of adults who don't puff, including many workers in a smoke-filled environment, and a population of children whose lungs shouldn't have to suffer for the destructive habits of the few, the selfish, the addicted. Where anti-smoking laws exist, they were enacted for the sake of those who don't smoke and don't enjoy sharing air with those who do.

No one, not even a nicotine junkie, is above the law. It's time for West Virginia to enforce the rules.