Support for ban on smoking at work

Press, 27 January 1988, Page 6

Support for ban on smoking at work

Employer restrictions on smoking at work were favoured by eighty-two per cent of the people surveyed in a National Research Bureau poll on public attitudes towards smoking and cigarette advertising. The poll was commissioned by the Cancer Society in November and December, and the society’s medical director, Dr Alan Gray, said the figures showed strong public support for the moves taken last year to restrict smoking in workplaces. “Such widespread support encourages us to feel that the efforts to increase public awareness of the health dangers of smoking are being increasingly effective,” he said. Ninety per cent of those who had never

smoked, and sixty-four per cent of regular smokers, believed that the tobacco smoke of others could endanger non-smokers’ health. Nine out of 10 people knew that smoking was a cause of illness and disease, especially lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema. Seventy-two per cent thought the Government should be active in discouraging smoking in order to reduce the diseases it caused. Seventy-six per cent, including more than half the non-smokers, supported a ban on smoking in enclosed public places. The percentage of adults who are regular smokers has fallen from 33 per cent in a 1984 N.R.B. poll, to 28 per cent in 1987. Two-thirds of these would like to stop, but most felt that

it would be difficult to do so even for a week. Considering this addictiveness of smoking, there was general support for the use of a stronger warning on cigarette packets to try to discourage young people from starting to smoke and to help smokers quit. The number of people who would like to see a ban on cigarette advertising has risen from 53 per cent to 65 per cent in the last four years. Dr Gray said that the ill health, caused by smoking, was often slow and silent in the beginning, but its effects were devastating in causing premature death. He said that one in five deaths of men aged 15 to 60 could be attributed to smoking, as could one in nine deaths of women.