Smoking Ban Update

Some good comments on my earlier smoking ban post. So I did a bit of Googling and I found this Reason article (Reason is a Libertarian/Objectivist magazine). The Reason article does a good job of showing why this result makes no sense. For example,

The American Heart Association attributes 35,000 heart disease deaths a year, about 5 percent of the total, to secondhand smoke. It seems reasonable to assume that the proportion would be similar for heart attacks, fatal or not. So even if a city completely eliminated secondhand smoke (which Helena’s ban did not do, since it did not apply to smoking at home), how could that possibly cut heart attacks in half?”

If you want the details of the methodology the doctors used, the Reason article also links to the authors’ Power Point slides.

AB