Smoking ban, taxes could aid quitting

Study finds that using both methods is most productive.

Higher taxes on cigarettes and laws banning public smoking both induce people to give up the habit, but bans work better, according to a study led by an Ohio State University sociology professor.

Researchers found the strongest deterrent in places with both a ban and relatively high cigarette taxes, according to the study released on Monday. But in places with only one or the other, the anti-smoking effect was about twice as strong in places with a ban.

Mike Vuolo, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State who led the study, said another important finding is that bans have their greatest effect on casual, or social, smokers — offering the opportunity to turn them into nonsmokers before they become addicted.

Bans apparently don’t have as strong a deterrent effect on heavy smokers, defined as those who smoke a pack or more per day. Conversely, the study showed high cigarette taxes are more of a deterrent to heavy smokers than to social ones.

The finding highlights the uphill climb of those working to make Columbus and Ohio healthier: Columbus banned public indoor smoking in 2004 and Ohio voters approved a statewide ban in 2006, yet as of December 2014, Ohio had the nation’s seventh-highest smoking rate at 21 percent, one of several health measures on which the state ranks at or near the bottom.

The ban has helped, said Columbus Health Commissioner Dr. Teresa Long. It’s just that Ohio started out with such high smoking rates. In the years before the ban, “We had rates as high as 27 and 28 percent,” she said. “We saw a major decrease when the indoor Smoke-Free Workplace Act went into effect.” From 2011 to 2014, according to the Ohio Department of Health, the rate dropped from 25.1 percent to 21 percent. Franklin County’s rate has been slightly below that of the state overall.

That still leaves Ohio with a long way to go to match healthier states such as Utah, which has the nation’s lowest rate of smoking at about 10 percent. The state health department’s goal is to see Ohio’s rate drop to 12 percent by 2020.

Long called the local and state smoking bans “an important first step,” and called for other measures, such as encouraging landlords, including in public housing, to ban smoking in their buildings. Some advocates for the poor, including managers of federally funded housing, have complained that such a ban would push people out of the only housing available to them. Long said that increased Medicaid funding for smoking-cessation treatment could help tenants comply.

Vuolo said his study is the first to look not only at statewide smoking bans and taxes but also at those imposed by local governments. Earlier studies, which grouped people only according to statewide smoking laws, failed to capture the effect of local regulations, he said. Also, he said the study measured changes in individuals’ smoking behavior, rather than relying on how much statewide smoking rates went up or down.

Researchers got that data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, in which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics first interviewed a group of teenagers in 1997 on a wide variety of topics and has followed up with annual interviews.

Also Monday, a separate study involving other Ohio State researchers was released, concluding that graphic images on cigarette packages, showing people deformed by smoking-related conditions, cause smokers to think harder about the habit’s dangers and to give more thought to quitting.

Participants in the study were given their preferred brands of cigarettes, in modified packages, for four weeks. All packages had text warnings, such as “cigarettes cause fatal lung disease.” Some also had one of nine graphic images. Participants were surveyed each week, and the results showed that those whose packages had the graphic images were more likely to say that they were concerned about their smoking. They also remembered the text warnings better and considered them more credible.

“The feelings produced by the graphic images acted as a spotlight,” said Ohio State psychology Professor Ellen Peters, a co-author of the study. “Smokers looked more carefully at the packages and, as a result, the health risks fell into the spotlight and led to more consideration of those risks.”

A federal law mandated such warning images to appear beginning in 2009, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the labels proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were unconstitutional.