UK Smoking Bans Have No Effect on Smokers Quitting
The number of people trying to quit smoking spiked in 2007 when the United Kingdom placed a ban on smoking in public places, but that spike quickly went down in a number of months, according to a study published in Addiction.
The findings of the study also suggested that even though smoking bans do encourage people to quit, those that do so are most likely the ones who already had some motivation to give up the tobacco products in their lives.
“Other contextual factors and social norms continue to influence smoking behavior”, said lead study author Lisa Szatkowski of the UK Center for Tobacco Control Studies. “Factors such as the provision of outdoor facilities for smoking, or spending time with smoking friends, may mean smoke free legislation does not act as a continuing stimulus to quit over time”, she explained in an email to Reuters Health.
In fact, the ban on smoking in public may have had no effect at all on getting people to kick the habit. In the nine months before the ban, prescriptions for medications to help patients stop smoking went up by 6.4%. However, nine months after the ban, the prescription rate went down by 6.4%. David Abrams of the National Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies said that even though these results were a bit disappointing, they weren’t surprising.
