smoke cigarettes
As one of the justifications to enact a smoking ban, anti smoking crusaders have said that they may help people quit smoking cigarettes. However this theory that smoking bans will somehow affect the behavior of cigarette smokers fails to materialize in fact, like so many of their other predictions. According to the Centers of Diseases Controls Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the percentage of former smokers in the United States in 2005 was 24.8%, virtually unchanged from the 24.7% rate in 2002. This time period is important because smoking bans took effect in Delaware in 2002, Florida and New York in 2003, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine and Massachusetts in 2004, and various municipalities enacted anti-smoking laws and tax increases during this 3-year period. One bright spot, from a tobacco control standpoint, is that the percentage of people who have never smoked cigarettes has risen by 2%. Some may say that this 2% increase, in the percentage of people who have never smoked cigarettes, is proof positive that smoking bans have had the desired effect. But remember this survey is limited to cigarette smoking. The manufacture of small cigars has risen from about 2.5 billion in 2002 to 4.6 billion in 2005. During this same time period the consumption of large cigars increased from 4.2 billion to 5 billion, while the consumption of smoking tobacco, used to make homemade cigarettes and by pipe smokers, increased from 18 million pounds to 19.4 million pounds. (1 pound of loose tobacco makes approximately 600 cigarettes.)

