Speaking of heart attack miracles, a new one has been discovered to justify a possible statewide smoking ban in Mississippi:
A ban on indoor smoking has paid big dividends for the health of Starkville residents.
In the three years after the ban was enacted in 2006, Starkville had 27 percent fewer heart attacks than in the three years preceding the ban, based on the results of a Mississippi State University Social Science Research Study released Monday.
Of course none of the reporters covering the story bothered to include of a word of skepticism, and dramatic results like this don’t appear in large samples in the UK, Australia, and US states. But hey, Starkville!
More on the problems with small-town heart attack studies here and here.
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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Why the snarky tone in your write-up? Are you thinking these positive results are laughable because you are picturing a few rednecks sitting in front of an old courthouse? Is “Deuling Banjos” running through your head? Ha, ha, ha, so HERE is proof that smoking bans work?
“Starkville” does SOUND like such a place. And, of course, Johnny Cash got arrested there for picking flowers. But Starkville means Mississippi State University. The people affected by the smoking ban include thousands of students and professors. Don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing in your eyes.
Either way, the net of these statistics cover a lot of professors educated at the best schools in the world. To be fair, many of them probably regret taking a job in Starkville, but that’s another matter.
I’m just offering this as a corrective to your tone. I might react them same way if these results were from a study of, say, Athens, Ohio. Sounds like the middle of nowhere to ME. But, you know, it’s not.
@kenneth: My tone has nothing to do with the kinds of people who work there, but with the size of the town: a little over 20,000 permanent residents according to Wikipedia. As with the studies in Pueblo, Colorado and Helena, Montana, it’s shameless to put so much emphasis on what happens in small samples when there’s so much data from entire states and countries to go on. My snarky tone is aimed at people who think results from random small towns prove anything about smoking bans.
So no, I don’t care whether the smoking ban is affecting college profs are rednecks, because I don’t think the ban is significantly affecting their health either way.
Of course, it’s always possible that the ban had “some”thing to do with the results. But I don’t think it led a lot of people to quit smoking. I don’t live in Starkville. The change it would affect in me is that I wouldn’t eat out very much. Think that makes a difference?
I’d like to see someone open a restaurant and bar for smokers ONLY. Sort of the reverse-discrimination thing. And all you non-smokers can’t whine about not being allowed to partake. Columbus is a town with enough restaurants that if you don’t want to be around smoke, you have plenty of places to eat, smoke-free. We smokers don’t have many choices anymore, as there are more restaurants that are already non-smoking. On those that do allow it, there are a few that have the sections reversed, where non-smokers have to walk through (or worse, wait in line) the smoking section to get to the non-smoking section. Even this smoker thinks that should be corrected.