Anti-smoking legislations had only positive effects, researchers declared. They found recently that inhabitants’ hospitalized for heart attacks and respiratory diseases has decreased very much in Toronto because the city prohibited smoking in bars and restaurants.

For the first time researchers from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences investigated the effect of anti-smoking legislation on a more wide range. It studied three cardiovascular diseases, as heart attacks, angina, and of course three respiratory ones, as pneumonia, asthma and chronic bronchitis. But previous studies have focused their investigations only on heart attacks.

At the end of investigations they were surprised by the findings they discovered. For example, they discovered that hospitalization for cardiovascular conditions decreased 39 percent, involving a 17.4 percent drop in heart attacks, although hospital visits for respiratory conditions fell by 33 percent. The study last 10 year in Toronto hospitals, from January 1996, three years before the first period of the city’s smoking ban, to March 2006, two years after the last period.

The ban in Toronto was launched in three phases: workplaces and public buildings in October 1999, restaurants in June 2001 and bars in June 2004. The previous studies couldn’t prove an immediate cause-and-effect interrelation between the smoking ban and dropped hospitalization because a lot of factors such as a yearly decrease of smokers and increased anti-smoking advertisements, probable contributed to the decline of diseases caused by smoking among inhabitants.

But researchers observed a faster drop in hospitalization in the years following the first period of the ban.

However the study was not able to conclude what change has happened with people affected by second-hand smoke because researchers didn’t know if people who went to hospital were smokers or non-smokers.

Unfortunately smoking ban can make all smokers to quit because they are addicted to it. For example, a longtime smoker rested in a pub and enjoyed his cigarettes with a few after-work beers, and he declared: “Smoking and drinking go together like chocolate topping on ice cream. That’s why I’m here drinking cold beer on a cold area on a cold April day.”