Restaurant smoking bans don’t just protect diners and staff from other people’s smoke, they help stop young people becoming habitual smokers.
In 2001, Michael Siegel and colleagues at Boston University surveyed 3834 Massachusetts youths, with follow-ups two and four years later. In towns where restaurants had no smoking bans or kept smoking areas, 9.8 per cent had smoked over 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes, compared with 7.9 per cent in towns with smoking bans. Once the researchers corrected for factors such as whether their parents smoked, those in towns with bans were 35 per cent less likely to be habitual…
