Smoking: Policy and Politics

Last March the Cambridge City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting smoking in all public buildings, but church bingo players and area bowling teams are among a few select groups exempt from the law. At least one Harvard researcher, who is studying the social effects of the ordinance, is trying to find out why.

Littauer Professor of Political Economy Thomas C. Schelling has quit smoking four times, and now, as director of the Kennedy School's Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior and Policy, Schelling has been working to understand how smoking laws affect people's willingness to quit the tobacco habit, as well as learn why people start and stop smoking in the first place.

Cambridge Reaction

"Before the [Cambridge] law went into effect we called up people in Cambridge, and then we called them three months after it went into effect to see how the law had affected them. What we found was that there was a significant [environmental] difference in the workplaces and in public places. Surely if you go into a barber shop or museum, smoking is restricted," Schelling says.

"We also talked to one large corporation headquarters in Cambridge. They had a hard time coming into compliance," says Schelling, who has been the only director of the four-year old Institute.

"The difficulties are that in a large corporation with different buildings it's hard to decide who enforces the law. Will it be the personnel head or the leader of health safety? And it's difficult to cope with union employees who see smoking as something that comes under collective bargaining," says Schelling, who also studies climate change, behavioral analysis and national security affairs.

Schelling says he has noticed that many company employees who previously smoked only at work have now quit completely as they do not like the idea of going outdoors or into a room reserved for smokers.

"Also we are trying to find ways to help people who want to quit by bringing in a therapist to the company or by giving them money to go to a hypnotist or someone who can help them," he says.

Schelling noted that the Cambridge city councilors did not plan the anti-smoking ordinance as carefully as they could have.

"They made an exception for church bingo and allowed the players to smoke. But they forgot about Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Wherever there is psychotherapy involved it's hard not to let people smoke," Schelling says.

Cutting out smoking in bowling alleys has presented problems, as well. Cambridge "has since had to make an exception for bowling alleys, too. Those places make their money from teams. If one member of a team smokes and can't at the alley, he might hurt the chances of his team's victory; so, they can just go across the river to Brighton. [The smoking policy] was hurting the local alleys," Schelling says.

Some merchandisers are glad to see the smoking ordinance in effect. "The existence of the ordinance is a great excuse for people who like to ban smoking. Take a jeweler, for instance. He doesn't want smoke on the jewels, but he doesn't want to ask someone to put out a cigarrette because they might leave. This way they can blame it on the city," he says.

Since cities have begun implementing antismoking policies, the number of smokers has gone down, according to Schelling, who teaches courses at both the K-School and the College.

"The progress is really phenomenal," he says. "It really isn't that the federal government or the states have done anything--until the past two years. But the cities have, and now half of all men who smoked have quit. And two-fifths of the women who smoked have quit, too.

"Essentially our research tells us [smoking] is becoming lower class behavior. Blue collar people smoke more than white collar," says Schelling, who received his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard in 1951.

Lapsing Into Relapse

"One of the big things we study is relapse," Schelling says. "Everybody's got the word that smoking is bad, and all sorts of people are trying to quit. But if you do relapse, how do you recoup your morale and do it again? That's what we want to figure out."

To determine the relapse rate of quitting smokers, Schelling and his assistants, Jan L. Hitchcock, Nancy A. Rigotti and Andrea M. Berman, surveyed a sample of smokers in the Boston area.

"I called several hundred smokers to see if there are patterns with which people return to smoking if they have quit. Are there multiple attempts to quit? Do they just smoke on and off?" says Hitchcock, whose special interest is studying how smoking patterns have changed thoughout history.

"What we found was that there is substantial variation. The person's initial motivation to quit will determine the frequency with which they relapse. There is a complexity of problems--it's a very descriptive study," says Hitchcock, who used original as well as previously collected data to support her work.

Public Policy

Schelling says that the success of Cambridge's anti-smoking policy will lead to more states passing laws governing smoking, and he is now conducting policy studies at the K-School to prepare for such a trend.

"I belive we have been very influential on policy," he says. "A Kennedy School student did a study for the Massachusetts Commission on Health to see what to do in state areas [about smoking policy]. It went straight to [Gov. Michael S.] Dukakis, and now it has been implemented."

"We were also influential in keeping the 16 cent cigarrette tax the same and not cut back in half to eight cents," he says.

Schelling says the Institute will continue to shape policy as long as it maintains research activities and holds conferences to make congressmen and other policy makers informed of the advances in smoking policy.

"We are not a lobbying group," though, says Hitchcock. "We just want to show people what the options are in quitting. The general idea, except among the tobacco industry, is that smoking is bad for your health. We're trying to give people a wide range of topics."