Smoking Bans and Less Alcohol Drinkers

A research conducted by the Yale School of Medicine has found that states with smoking bans in bars may also have higher recovery rates from alcohol use disorder, or AUD. Past data have shown that smokers are four times as likely as non-smokers to have AUD, and almost 35 per cent of individuals with AUD are nicotine-dependent. However, the Yale study was the first in the country to observe the relationship between smoking bans in bars and AUD remission rates. The study’s findings were published in the journal “Drug and Alcohol Dependence” in late September.

Using information collected by the National Epidemiological Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions, scientists analyzed data that investigated 19,763 inhabitants in 49 states from 2001-’02 and 2004-’05. Almost 85 per cent of the study’s participants came from states that do not have smoke-free bar policies. The other 15 percent came from the eight states in the country that do — Delaware, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

“Smoking cheap Winston cigs and drinking are considered complements, so if smoking becomes more difficult, use of alcohol may decreased,” argued Jody Sindelar, one of the study’s lead authors and a professor at both the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. “This would be likely to occur in bars in which smoking tobacco is prohibited.”

Professor Kurt Ribisl of the University Of North Carolina Gillings School Of Public Health said the findings were intriguing. Smoking bans, he said, were originally created to drop tobacco smoke in public places and private establishments, but this finding adds a new boon to a long-fought public health campaign. Yet ordinance recommendations related to smoking bans in bars may not necessarily result from this research.

“This is not a strong enough study, with strong enough results linked to causality, for which you could make a law recommendation and not be faced with a lot of criticism,” declared Adam Goldstein, Professor at the UNC School of Medicine and Director of the UNC Nicotine Dependence Program.

Location-specific smoking bans, Goldstein added, may not necessarily lead to an overall decrease in tobacco consumption — only smoking in those locations. This principle may extend to alcohol consumption as well, he said.

In order to prove causality between bar smoking bans and AUD, Goldstein said, experiments would need to eliminate existing differences in factors besides the presence or absence of a smoking ban. Both Goldstein and Ribisl said states with smoking bans in bars tend to focus more on public health and may already have strong campaigns focusing on AUD.

Although causality has yet to be proven, Ribisl added that studies establishing relationships usually occur before those determining causality.

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