Tobacco Scam: Smokefree Restaurants: Fake Economics

How does Big Tobacco fool restaurant and bar owners into thinking cost-free smokefree measures are business poison — and the only antidote is an expensive, ineffective ventilation system or remodel?

1. It pays for biased surveys and business "studies."

2. It distorts or ignores research results counter to its own propaganda.

3. It repeats its own lies so often that people start to believe them.

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

Big Tobacco has predicted ruin for smokefree restaurants and bars for twenty years, with surveys and studies to back it up. The prediction is wrong, its surveys and studies are false and misleading, and Big Tobacco knows it.

At a secret 1994 meeting, Philip Morris marketing and sales director David Laufer reported:

...economic arguments often used by the [tobacco] industry to scare off smoking ban activity were no longer working, if indeed they ever did. These arguments simply had no credibility with the public, which isn't surprising when you consider our dire predictions in the past rarely came true.

In fact, predictions of massive drops in business NEVER came true. If anything, smokefree measures actually boost restaurant profits. Yet "dire predictions" continue to circulate whenever smokefree measures are proposed and passed. And Big Tobacco continues to sponsor new "research" — while often disguising who pays.

Big Tobacco loves bad science...

Bogus studies are nothing new for Big Tobacco. It's used the same tactic for half a century to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke. Often Big Tobacco employs front groups to conduct and release bogus studies, then quotes the resulting press coverage as "proof" the studies are reliable.

The tactic is so blatant, Consumer Reports published an exposé of how Big Tobacco spread "The 30% Myth" that smokefree measures harm restaurants.

The "level playing field" myth...

To get hospitality groups to front for it in preempting local smokefree measures, Big Tobacco convinces them to demand a "level playing field" statewide.

The fear? Smokers will abandon their favorite restaurants and bars if they go smokefree — and travel to another town where they can still smoke. This turns out to be as unfounded as Big Tobacco's claim that smokefree measures hurt the hospitality business at all. Common sense says why:

Independent studies nationwide show smokefree measures have, if anything, a POSITIVE effect on business. If customers don't leave, why worry where they go?

Smokers don't cross city or county lines to smoke, they just step outside — or skip a smoke, as they do on planes, buses, or at work. Smokefree workplaces already cost Big Tobacco billions in sales because they make it easier for smokers to cut down or quit. That's why Big Tobacco fights smokefree measures.

What smokers did in Sacramento...

Objective evidence shows people don't leave town to smoke:

In 1990, both the city of Sacramento, California, and the suburban county surrounding it passed identical smokefree restaurant measures. Big Tobacco tried to block both measures from going into effect, but succeeded only in the county. So, for about two years, the smokefree city was completely encircled by suburbs with no restrictions — a perfect laboratory to see what smokers would do.

To observe if restaurant business shifted out of the city into the county, as Big Tobacco's fronts would predict, researchers used a sensitive but simple indicator. They objectively compared city restaurant sales tax records to county restaurant sales tax records, before and for a full year after the city went smokefree.

If smokers fled city restaurants for county restaurants — only minutes away, in many cases — city restaurant revenues would decline and county restaurant revenues would pick up. This would be directly reflected in sales tax reports. The changing city/county ratio, before and after, would jump out even if the restaurant business overall rose or fell.

The ratio didn't change. Diners stayed put. Tax receipts showed smokers did not leave smokefree Sacramento city for smoking Sacramento county, even when they so easily could.

The first chance they had, county voters ratified a smokefree restaurant measure — by 56% — despite a costly Big Tobacco campaign run through a local front group it named the Sacramento Restaurant and Merchant Association.