Smoking bans are public policies, including criminal laws and occupational safety and health regulations, which prohibit tobacco smoking in workplaces and/or other public spaces. Legislation may also define smoking as more generally being the carrying or possessing of any lit tobacco product.
Rationale
The rationale for smoke-free laws is to protect people from the effects of second-hand smoke, which include an increased risk of heart disease, cancer, emphysema, and other diseases. Laws implementing bans on indoor smoking have been introduced by many countries in various forms over the years, with some legislators citing scientific evidence that shows tobacco smoking is harmful to the smokers themselves and to those inhaling second-hand smoke.
In addition, such laws may lower health care costs in the short term (but may actually increase them in the long term), improve work productivity, and lower the overall cost of labor in a community, thus making a community more attractive for employers. In Indiana, the state's economic development agency wrote into its 2006 plan for acceleration of economic growth an encouragement to cities and towns to adopt local smoke-free workplace laws as a means of promoting job growth in communities.
Additional rationales for smoking restrictions include reduced risk of fire in areas with explosive hazards; cleanliness in places where food, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, or precision instruments and machinery are produced; decreased legal liability; potentially reduced energy use via decreased ventilation needs; reduced quantities of litter; healthier environments; and giving smokers incentive to quit.
The World Health Organization considers smoke-free laws to have an influence to reduce demand for tobacco by creating an environment where smoking becomes increasingly more difficult and to help shift social norms away from the acceptance of smoking in everyday life. Along with tax measures, cessation measures, and education, smoking ban policy is currently viewed as an important element in lowering smoking rates and promoting public health. When correctly and strictly implemented it is seen as one important policy agenda goal to change human behavior away from unhealthy behavior and towards a healthy lifestyle.
Medical and scientific basis for bans
Main article: Passive smokingResearch has generated evidence that secondhand smoke causes the same problems as direct smoking, including lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, and lung ailments such as emphysema, bronchitis, and asthma. Specifically, meta-analyses show that lifelong non-smokers with partners who smoke in the home have a 20–30% greater risk of lung cancer than non-smokers who live with non-smokers. Non-smokers exposed to cigarette smoke in the workplace have an increased lung cancer risk of 16–19%.
A study issued in 2002 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization concluded that non-smokers are exposed to the same carcinogens as active smokers. Sidestream smoke contains 69 known carcinogens, particularly benzopyrene and other polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, and radioactive decay products, such as polonium 210. Several well-established carcinogens have been shown by the tobacco companies' own research to be present at higher concentrations in secondhand smoke than in mainstream smoke.
Scientific organizations confirming the harmful effects of secondhand smoke include the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Surgeon General of the United States, and the World Health Organization.
Air quality
Bans on smoking in bars and restaurants can substantially improve the air quality in such establishments. For example, one study listed on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that New York's statewide law to eliminate smoking in enclosed workplaces and public places substantially reduced RSP (respirable suspended particles) levels in western New York hospitality venues. RSP levels were reduced in every venue that permitted smoking before the law was implemented, including venues in which only second-hand smoke from an adjacent room was observed at baseline. The CDC concluded that their results were similar to other studies which also showed substantially improved indoor air quality after smoking bans.
A 2004 study showed New Jersey bars and restaurants had more than nine times the levels of indoor air pollution of neighboring New York City, which had enacted its ban.
Research has also shown that improved air quality translates to decreased toxin exposure among employees. For example, among employees of the Norwegian establishments that enacted smoking bans, tests showed improved (decreased) levels of nicotine in the urine of both smoking and non-smoking workers (as compared with measurements prior to the ban).
History
One of the world's earliest smoking bans was a 1575 Mexican ecclesiastical council ban that forbid the use of tobacco in any church in Mexico and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. The Ottoman sultan Murad IV prohibited smoking in his empire in 1633. The Pope also banned smoking in the Church, Pope Urban VII in 1590 and Urban VIII in 1624. Pope Urban VII in particular threatened to excommunicate anyone who "took tobacco in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose". The earliest citywide European smoking bans were enacted shortly thereafter. Such bans were enacted in Bavaria, Kursachsen, and certain parts of Austria in the late 1600s. Smoking was banned in Berlin in 1723, in Königsberg in 1742, and in Stettin in 1744. These bans were repealed in the revolutions of 1848. The first building in the world to have a smoke-free policy was the Old Government Building in Wellington, New Zealand in 1876. This was over concerns about the threat of fire, as it is the second largest wooden building in the world. The first modern, nationwide tobacco ban was imposed by the Nazi Party in every German university, post office, military hospital, and Nazi Party office, under the auspices of Karl Astel's Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research, created in 1941 under orders from Adolf Hitler. Major anti-tobacco campaigns were widely broadcast by the Nazis until the demise of the regime in 1945.
In the latter part of the 20th century, as research on the risks of secondhand tobacco smoke became public, the tobacco industry launched "courtesy awareness" campaigns. Fearing reduced sales, the industry created a media and legislative program that focused on "accommodation". Tolerance and courtesy were encouraged as a way to ease heightened tensions between smokers and those around them, while avoiding smoking bans. In the USA, states were encouraged to pass laws providing separate smoking sections.
In 1975, the US state of Minnesota enacted the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act , making it the first state to ban smoking in most public spaces. At first, restaurants were required to have No Smoking sections, and bars were exempt from the Act. As of October 1, 2007, Minnesota enacted a ban on smoking in all restaurants and bars statewide, called the Freedom to Breathe Act of 2007.
In 1990, the city of San Luis Obispo, California, became the first city in the world to ban indoor smoking at all public places, including bars and restaurants.
In America, the success of the ban enacted by the state of California in 1998 encouraged other states such as New York to implement bans. California's smoking ban included a controversial ban of smoking in bars, extending the statewide workplace smoking ban enacted in 1994. As of April 2009 there were 37 states with some form of smoking ban. Some areas in California began making entire cities smoke-free, which would include every place except residential homes. More than 20 cities in California enacted park and beach smoking bans.
On March 29, 2004, the Republic of Ireland implemented a ban on smoking in the workplace, the first country to do so. In Norway similar legislation was put into force on July 1 the same year. The whole of the United Kingdom became subject to a ban on smoking in enclosed public places in 2007, when England became the final region to have the legislation come into effect. The age limit for buying tobacco was also raised from 16 to 18 on October 1, 2007. In 2007, Chandigarh became the first city in India to become 'smoke-free'. Smoking was banned in public indoor venues in Victoria, Australia on July 1, 2007.
Smoking bans by country
Main article: List of smoking bansA great number of mostly developed countries have enacted bans on smoking in public places or workplaces since the early 2000s, often in conjunction with a reduction in the proportion of the population who smoke. In many mostly developing countries, where tobacco consumption is high, smoking bans are unheard of or unenforced.
The only country to have banned the sale and smoking of tobacco in public entirely is Bhutan.Also, a
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