North Carolina health officials are praising the benefits of a 5-year-old state law that banned smoking in bars and restaurants. Today marks five years since the effective date of the law that also limited smoking rooms at hotels or motels.
The state Department of Health and Human Services praised the law for delivering "significant and impressive" results in a few short years.
State health officials say North Carolina saw a 21 percent drop in average weekly heart attack cases at emergency departments in the first year. They say the law encouraged other businesses to go smoke-free and contributed to fewer children smoking.
Sally Herndon, head of the Tobacco Prevention and Control Branch in North Carolina Division of Public Health affirmed the impact of minimizing smoking exposure to youth: "We have our lowest smoking rates in NC among young people if they can stay off cigarettes until they turn 21 or 22, then they are much less likely to start to smoke at that age."
Herndon also noted that North Carolina was was first state in the South to enact a smoking ban in restaurants and bars. Today, she said, 33 states have some kind of smoking ban in public places.