Rethinking Tobacco Control: The Efficacy of Bans and Taxes
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“If IT were totally up to me, I would raise the cigarette tax so high the revenues from it would go to zero,” thundered Michael Bloomberg back in 2002. New York city’s combative mayor has since raised cigarette taxes several times. The effect has been limited, so he wants to try something new. He recently proposed to outlaw discounting cigarettes and displaying them openly in stores.
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Whether these measures will be approved – and help – remains to be seen. But Mr. Bloomberg may well be right to push for more bans. A new paper by Abel Brodeur of the Paris School of Economics, based on extensive surveys in America, suggests that bans on smoking are not just effective but actually make smokers happier. By not allowing them to light up in restaurants and bars (as New York already does), governments give weaker willed individuals an excuse to do what they otherwise cannot: stop smoking. As an additional benefit, bans also seem to make spouses of smokers happier.
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A second paper provides ammunition to those sceptical of higher cigarette taxes as a way of discouraging smoking. John Cawley of Cornell University and Stephanie von Hinke Kessler Scholder of York University looked at how sensitive young American smokers are to higher cigarette prices. Not very, it turns out. That is because a big share 46% of teen age girls and 30% of teenage boys do not smoke for pleasure, but to stay thin or lose weight.
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That may not be healthy, but it is rational: cigarettes appear to suppress the appetite and increase the metabolic rate. At any rate, a desire to lose weight makes young smokers much less sensitive to price changes: other ways of shedding pounds, such as eating less or exercising more, are less appealing. What is more, few teenagers spend a lot of money on cigarettes. A 2003 study by researchers from the University of Minnesota found that only 16% of teenage smokers had bought their last fags themselves.
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Bans may not do much to stop already illicit smoking by young people. Luckily, the study also opens up a new line of attack: convincing smokers that they are in fact not overweight, judged by their body mass index, a way of measuring whether people are under or overweight, many girls (but not boys) who smoked to get thinner were of perfectly normal weight.
