Tobacco Scam: Smokefree Restaurants: Fake Economics

How can you tell if smokefree measures affect the hospitality business? It's simple: look at actual business results before and after.

Methodologically-sound studies have examined the real impact of such measures on business revenues or employment in more than eighty U.S. locales and around the world. These studies are sound because:

1. They use objective data (sales reported to tax authorities, or government employment or tourism statistics) collected by a neutral party with no interest in the secondhand smoke issue.

2. They collect and analyze data for several years before the law went into effect so underlying economic trends, and seasonal and random variations, can be accounted for.

3. They cover all hospitality businesses, not a biased few.

No properly conducted study shows a negative economic impact. Some even show that a smokefree measure improves business.

While seasonal fluctuations persist, revenues from California restaurant bars and free-standing bars continued to climb after restaurants became smokefree in mid-1994 (light blue) and after free-standing bars went smokefree in 1998 (dark blue). Details

Big Tobacco has also claimed that California's smokefree law hurt bars. But a look at actual sales tax receipts proves that, just as local measures don't hurt bars, neither did the statewide measure that followed some years later.

As Big Tobacco warnings on bars and restaurants have lost credibility, it has begun to make equally unfounded claims that tourism will suffer. No objective, properly-conducted study has uncovered any negative effect on tourism.