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Wednesday, December 7, 2005

Enjoy Those Final Puffs

Posted by on December 7 at 18:02 PM

I won’t gloat tonight, I swear. In fact, I’ll probably be asleep when the ban goes into effect—I’m feeling a little fluish. But I will post these graphs, from Eli Sanders’s terrific piece on the impact of smoking bans, “Last Gasp,” which ran in The Stranger a year-and-a-half ago:

When I ask Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who has studied the economic impact of smoking bans in California and elsewhere, to tell me what he makes of the argument that smoking bans hurt business at bars and restaurants, he says, “There’s a technical term for that: Bullshit.”

In New York City, which enacted its ban in March 2003, receipts at restaurants and bars are up by 8.7 percent one year later, and employment at those businesses is up by 10,600 jobs, according to a study conducted by the city. In Victoria, where opponents of the 1999 ban claimed a devastating $6 million loss to bars and restaurants, a study commissioned by the Vancouver Island Health Authority found that this loss did not, in fact, take place. In El Paso, which enacted its ban in 2002, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found no negative economic impact.

“This is something that has been studied over and over and over again,” Glantz says, his voice rising with exasperation at the fact that people are still calling to ask him whether the economic harm argument is true. “There have been more than 100 places studied. And it has simply never materialized. The only so-called studies that conclude there is an effect are things that the tobacco industry has funded either directly or indirectly.”

Cheers, Mr. Meinert!


CommentsRSS icon

Hey Dan, the link for the article you have does not bring you there, it tells you it can't be found as a result of things being moved around.

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