First of all, the headline is a little misleading. It says “Every state will ban smoking.” They aren’t banning smoking, they’re just banning it in bars and restaurants.

It will be interesting to revisit this in 9 years to see if the CDC is right. It’s not a particularly bold prediction, since there are only 12 states left that *don’t* have smoking bans. The article says seven — Texas, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Wyoming, South Carolina — but that’s incorrect. They forgot to mention Alaska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Alabama and North Dakota. It’s 12 states that do not *effectively* have smoking bans in either bars or restaurants.

What’s interesting is, in most of these states, the major cities all have smoking bans — Houston, Dallas, Austin, El Paso, Charleston, Louisville, Lexington, Indianapolis, Casper, Cheyenne, Kansas City, St. Louis and now Bismarck (Bismarck voters just approved a smokefree law — by a HUGE margin — about 60-40 percent). So, even though there are no statewide bans in these states, there really aren’t that many places in those states where you can still light up in a bar or a restaurant.

By coincidence, most of these states have high smoking rates and high lung cancer rates.

The article correctly states that smoking bans do drive down smoking rates and that hospital admissions for heart disease among *non-smokers* have consistently declined in communities that have smoking bans.