Smoking laws saving lives
Ban in bars, restaurants, workplaces shown to help reduce heart attacks
Where there’s smoke, there are heart attacks.
That’s the conclusion of a report released recently by the independent Institute of Medicine. Its experts studied the conclusions of many other reports and determined that bans on smoking in restaurants, bars and workplaces often lead to significant declines in the number of heart attacks.
This data should push those jurisdictions still wondering whether they should ban smoking in public places in the direction of doing so. In New York, where comprehensive smoking limits have been in place for six years, the report goes firmly in the I Told You So File.
Smoking is generally, and correctly, associated with lung cancer, which kills slowly. But the report emphasizes that cigarette smoke causes blood vessels to constrict and blood to clot. That very bad coincidence can lead the smoker—or the person sitting two tables away—to have a heart attack and die much more quickly.
The institute’s team read just about all there was to read on the subject and found that, depending on the locale, the number of heart attacks in an area that banned smoking in public places dropped anywhere from 6 percent to 47 percent after the ban took effect.
Those likely to have a Marlboro-induced heart attack, to be sure, are seldom paragons of health to begin with. Those at risk are likely already suffering from heart disease, diagnosed or not, probably overweight, suffering from high blood pressure or otherwise a typical 21st century American.
That doesn’t mean they deserve to die just so someone else can have his nicotine fix. Or that they should have to avoid both office work and the pleasure of dining out just to protect themselves from what could be the final, in keeping with the old expression for cigarettes, coffin nail.
The federal Centers for Disease Control, which ordered up the Institute of Medicine report, had already counted much of the damage. Heart disease, it reports, is the leading cause of death in the United States. America averages a heart attack about every 25 seconds, a heart-attack death about every minute.
Considering the ever-growing cost of health care, and the strain it is putting on both personal budgets and the taxpayers, any reasonable step that can be taken to decrease that strain on the system is a good idea. New York can be proud of the fact that is has led the nation in the trend to ban smoking in public places. It matters. It works. It saves lives.
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