New Publication – Tobacco Bans Help

With the help of some genius colleagues,we published a new article A 14-year longitudinal study of the impact of clean indoor air legislation on state smoking prevalence, USA, 1997–2010 is being published in Preventive Medicine. I think it will be the first article published in this journal that discusses the value of salutogenesis.  Salutogenesis was relevant because a health promoting environment cannot include smoking. For this research we wondered if states with more tobacco bans had a related difference in smoking rates. Beyond the fact that bans produce cleaner and healthier environments, do those bans effect smoking rates?  We know that higher taxes lowers smoking rates and our study found that states with ban have an impact. Bans lowered smoking rates above and beyond the impact of tobacco taxes and the longer the ban in place, the greater its impact.  Here is the abstract:

Abstract

While clean indoor air legislation at the state level is an evidence-based recommendation, only limited evidence exists regarding the impact of clean indoor air policies on state smoking prevalence. Using state smoking prevalence data from 1997 to 2010, a repeated measures observational analysis assessed the association between clean indoor air policies (i.e., workplace, restaurant, and bar) and state smoking prevalence while controlling for state cigarette taxes and year. The impacts from the number of previous years with any clean indoor air policy, the number of policies newly in effect during the current year, and the number of policies in effect the previous year were analyzed. Findings indicate a smoking prevalence predicted decrease of 0.13 percentage points (p = 0.03) for each additional year one or more clean indoor air policies were in effect, a predicted decrease of 0.12 percentage points (p = 0.09) for each policy newly in effect in the current year, and a predicted decrease of 0.22 percentage points (p = 0.01) for each policy in effect in the previous year on the subsequent year. Clean indoor air policies show measurable associations with reductions in smoking prevalence within a year of implementation above and beyond taxes and time trends. Further efforts are needed to diffuse clean indoor air policies across states and provinces that have not yet adopted such policies.

If you are interested, you can read the in-press version of this soon to be Open Access article here.

Be Well’r,
Craig Becker

Be selfish, selfless, & synergistic so everyone and everything benefits!