Do smoking bans really make people quit smoking? As one of the justifications to enact a smoking ban, anti smoking crusaders have said that they may help people quit smoking cigarettes. However this theory that smoking bans will somehow affect the behavior of cigarette smokers fails to materialize in fact, like so many of their other predictions. According to the Centers of Diseases Controls Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the percentage of former smokers in the United States in 2005 was 24.8%, virtually unchanged from the 24.7% rate in 2002. This time period is important because smoking bans took effect in Delaware in 2002, Florida and New York in 2003, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine and Massachusetts in 2004, and various municipalities enacted anti-smoking laws and tax increases during this 3-year period. One bright spot, from a tobacco control standpoint, is that the percentage of people who have never smoked cigarettes has risen by 2%. Some may say that this 2% increase, in the percentage of people who have never smoked cigarettes, is proof positive that smoking bans have had the desired effect. But remember this survey is limited to cigarette smoking. The manufacture of small cigars has risen from about 2.5 billion in 2002 to 4.6 billion in 2005. During this same time period the consumption of large cigars increased from 4.2 billion to 5 billion, while the consumption of smoking tobacco, used to make homemade cigarettes and by pipe smokers, increased from 18 million pounds to 19.4 million pounds. (1 pound of loose tobacco makes approximately 600 cigarettes.)
persons who smoked cigarettes for the first time in 2004 was 2.1 million (67.8% were under the age of 18), up from 2.0 million in 2003 and 1.9 million in 2002.
accompanying anti smoking messages, have had during the last 3 years, is to encourage people in the “never smoked cigarettes” category to smoke cigars instead of cigarettes and to encourage new smokers, especially those under the age of 18, to try smoking a cigarette for the first time. These figures also suggest that despite the more than 1.5 billion dollars spent, on smoking cessation and smoking prevention programs, in the past 3 years, tobacco use is as popular or more popular than it has been in the last 10 years. Begging the question: why isn’t more of this money being spent on curing the diseases purportedly caused by tobacco use than on promoting an ineffectual and unpopular message? Jonathan Pinard, Executive Director New York Coalition of Social Smokers www.socialsmokers.org
Source: http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/tobacco/Data/table04.pdf Consumption of large cigars increased from 4.2 billion in 2002 to 5 billion in 2005, while the consumption of smoking tobacco, used to make homemade cigarettes and by pipe smokers, increased from 18 million pounds to 19.4 million pounds from 2002 to 2005. Source: http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/tobacco/Data/table03.pdf |
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