Study: Smoking ban won't bankrupt bars

Finding: Such laws aren't fatal blows for business.

WASHINGTON (AP) Sales tax revenues from seven California cities and
counties suggest that banning smoking in bars is not bad for business, says
a study in the American Journal of Public Health.

The tobacco industry strongly opposes smoking bans in restaurants and bars,
saying they keep customers away.

Previous studies had concluded bans did not hurt restaurant business. The
new study, in today's issue of the American Public Health Association's
journal, argues that bars aren't hurt, either.

``The claim that bars will go broke just is not supported by the facts,''
said Stanton Glantz of the University of CaliforniaSan Francisco.

The tobacco industryfunded National Smokers Alliance denounced the study
as containing ``a myriad of factual errors and misrepresentations.''

Glantz analyzed sales tax records from 1991 through 1995 for five
California cities Anderson, Davis, Redding, San Luis Obispo and Tiburon
and two counties, Santa Clara and Shasta.

Smoking bans did not hurt business in any area, Glantz concluded.

One analysis, for example, determined the fraction of retail sales that
bars account for in each area. Only one city, Anderson, posted any decline
after the smoking ban; the sales proportion dropped seventenths of 1
percent. But that was well within the city's normal business fluctuations
before the ban, Glantz said.

California is poised to ban smoking in every bar on Jan. 1.

The smokers' alliance is suing Glantz, a wellknown antitobacco
researcher, and the university over his previous findings that smoking bans
don't hurt restaurants. The smokers alliance argued that the earlier study
contained serious errors, and it repeated that contention in its reaction
to the new Glantz study.

The alliance said that Tiburon, one of the communities used by Glantz, has
``too few bars from which to draw meaningful economic conclusions.'' The
alliance also attacked a defense of Glantz by the American Public Health
Association.

After reexamining Glantz's earlier study, the public health association
issued a scathing attack on the smokers' group.

The alliance's arguments were ``a melange of scientifically inadmissible
manipulations of data,'' wrote journal editor Dr. Mervyn Susser of Columbia
University. He said the smokers' group's ``aim is to destroy (Glantz's)
career.''

The one significant error uncovered in Glantz's previous study the dates
when a few cities' smoking bans took effect were wrong did not alter his
conclusions, Susser wrote.

Glantz's study is the first to examine smoking bans in bars, but other
researchers have found ``there is no negative effect on these
restaurants,'' said Dr. Michael Ericksen of the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.