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Paediatric Pulmonology and Allergology
2007 October, Vol. X, No. 2 (3567-3572)
WORKPLACE SMOKING BANS ARE A VITAL PART OF TOBACCO CONTROL POLICY
David Simpson
Director of International Agency on Tobacco and Health & Visiting Professor of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Richard Doll Building, Old Road Campus, Roosevelt Drive, Oxford OX3 7LF, United Kingdom
National bans of smoking in all places where people are employed, which includes almost all enclosed public places, are a recent phenomenon. They are increasingly being implemented in Europe and elsewhere, as part of measures prompted by the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). While they comprise only one aspect of a comprehensive tobacco control policy, they offer multiple beneficial effects on future smoking rates, and hence on future disease. In addition to protecting non-smokers from exposure to tobacco smoke, they reduce the social acceptability of smoking, which in turn can prompt cessation and reduce children’s perceptions of smoking as an adult practice to be emulated. For these reasons, tobacco companies have long feared the social acceptability issue and continue to foster misleading counter-arguments to try to resist the implementation of smoking bans, in their efforts to resist effective smoking control action in order to retain their markets. All FCTC policy should be fully implemented as soon as possible.