# Smoking bans reduce cardiac deaths by 50%?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-bans-reduce-cardiac-deaths-by-50/603003>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 15, 2011, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-bans-reduce-cardiac-deaths-by-50/603003 "2011-11-15T14:33:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Turble](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8dc957/32.png) [@Turble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Turble)\
**Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smoking-bans-reduce-cardiac-deaths-by-50/603003/41 "2011-11-25T21:00:49Z")

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I looked up one of Dr. Simpson’s cites (which just happened to be on PubMed):  
[Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC155687/)

> [@](#):
>
> **Objective** To measure the relation between environmental tobacco smoke, as estimated by smoking in spouses, and long term mortality from tobacco related disease.
> 
> **Design** Prospective cohort study covering 39 years.
> 
> **Participants** 118 094 adults enrolled in late 1959 in the American Cancer Society cancer prevention study (CPS I), who were followed until 1998. Particular focus is on the 35 561 never smokers who had a spouse in the study with known smoking habits.
> 
> …
> 
> **Conclusions** The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.

If the doctor is selectively choosing his cites, I suggest he is selectively choosing cites which contain actual scientific data.

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