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Smoking Bans Prove Effective At Dissuading Casual Smokers

Trending News: Smoking Bans Discourage Smoking, But Only Among Casual Smokers

Why Is This Important?

Because smoking bans are about a lot more than just protecting the rights of non-smokers. 

Long Story Short

A new national study shows for the first time how smoking bans in cities, states and counties have persuaded light smokers to kick the habit.

Long Story

If you need data on city-level smoking bans in the United States, your first port of call would likely be the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation’s (ANRF) tobacco policy database. It provides a repository of close to 13,000 laws in over 5,000 municipalities, documenting the lobby group’s efforts to protect nonsmokers from exposure to secondhand smoke.

The ANRF are concerned with how smoking bans affect non-smokers. But what if you took data on those same policies and looked at how they affected smokers? That’s exactly what researchers from Ohio State and Purdue Universities did, for the first time conducting a national study on how smoking bans in cities, states and counties have persuaded smokers to kick the habit, publishing their findings in the September 2016 issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

And the result? People who were casual smokers before a ban was instituted in their area were much more likely to give up cigarettes after such a ban went into effect. This was particularly the case with young men — although smoking rates among women were already lower than those of men.

The data on smokers came from Ohio State’s own National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and involved 4,341 people from 487 cities who were interviewed every year from 2004 to 2011. All were aged between 19 and 31 during the time of the study. This was then matched to the ANRF data.

There were big changes in policy during that same period, with comprehensive city-wide smoking bans going from affecting just 14.9% of the sample size in 2004 to 58.7% in 2011. Results showed that the probability of a young man smoking in the last 30 days was 19% for a subject living in an area without a ban, but only 13% for someone who lived in an area with a ban.

“We found that the implementation of a smoking ban reduces the odds that a young person in that location will smoke at all over time. In other words, young people are less likely to smoke once a smoking ban goes into effect,” said co-author Mike Vuolo, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State, in a press release. The results accounted for other effects of tobacco control policies such as taxes, as well as characteristics like where people lived (all smoking bans, or lack thereof, aside).

The caveats? The effect didn’t hold with women, with the probability of smoking in the last 30 days already a much lower 11% regardless of whether they lived in a banned or non-banned area. Also, the ban was ineffective on those who smoked more than a pack a day.

What the bans did do, though, was prevent light smoking males from becoming heavy smokers. “There’s a lot of evidence that casual, social smokers are influenced by their environment,” Vuolo said. “If they can’t smoke inside with their friends at a restaurant or bar, they may choose not to smoke at all.”

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

When governments and municipalities ban smoking in certain areas, how much of it is driven by concerns for non-smoker rights, and how much is about encouraging smokers to give up?

Disrupt Your Feed

My local bar used to smell of cigarette smoke. Now it just smells of vomit.

Drop This Fact

The CDC reports that more than 16 million Americans are living with a disease caused by smoking.

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