Restaurant Smoking Bans Good for Business, Study Says

A new study finds that cities with smoking bans similar to the one proposed in San Francisco have not suffered economically as a result.

“We couldn’t even find a shred of a hint of a negative effect in other cities, and there’s not going to be any in San Francisco,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco.

The study, released last week by the university’s Institute for Health Policy Studies, finds that smoking bans are good for business because they help restaurants capture a higher market share of total retail sales.

Researchers compared State Board of Equalization tax data on four cities with restaurant smoking bans to similar data from four cities without the laws.

The study, by Glantz and Lisa Smith, an analyst with the Tobacco Prevention Center in Sacramento, sharply contradicts longstanding claims by the restaurant and tobacco industries that laws banning smoking in restaurants cut business at least 30%.

Such industry claims helped officials in Beverly Hills rescind that city’s ban five months after it went into effect.

The Golden Gate Restaurant Assn., which has estimated that a ban would cost the city’s restaurants $12.8 million a year in lost revenue, did not have a comment on Glantz’s study.

But a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, the Washington lobbyist arm of the cigarette industry, called Glantz “an anti-smoking zealot.”