Jump to full article: News-Medical.net, 2008-04-09
Intro: British researchers say some of the recent strategies employed to reduce the dangers of smoking may not be as effective as imagined.
Dr. Francesca Cornaglia, an economist at Queen Mary University, London, says smoking bans in bars and restaurants could be forcing smokers back to homes where children's health could be affected and the bans may be doing more harm than good.
Dr. Cornaglia also suggests that heavily taxing cigarettes may not improve the health of smokers, because smokers compensate by extracting more nicotine from each cigarette.
Dr. Cornaglia who works in labour economics, applied micro-econometrics and health economics, has written a number of papers on the economics of smoking. . . .
However Dr. Cornaglia says smoking bans might be beneficial in the long term because they might encourage parents to quit.
The researchers say previous research which measured smoking only by the number of cigarettes smoked was an imprecise measure because smokers adjust not only the number of cigarettes smoked but also the amount of nicotine they extract.
The authors presented their research "Taxes, Cigarette Consumption and Smoking Intensity", this week at the Australian National University, presented by the Economics Program and the 'Productive Australia in the World Economy' theme in the Research School of Social Sciences.
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