The CBC article ‘Smoking bans cut hospital admissions: study’ states the following:

In Monday’s issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the researchers reported the following changes since the ban took effect:

• 17 per cent decrease in the heart attack hospitalization rate.
• 33 per cent decrease in rates of admission for respiratory conditions such as asthma, pneumonia and bronchitis.
• 39 per cent decrease in admissions because of cardiovascular conditions such as angina and stroke.

This article isn’t all that fascinating. One would think that this is a logical outcome. Smoke less, live longer and be sick less. Common sense? I thought so until I started reading the comments on the article (obviously, for the smoking community this is a hot topic). A sample:

.. 2nd hand smoke is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the general public by its own Govt

A hogwash study to justify the moronic freedom-destroying legislation from our Nannystate.

Yet another example on how one can cheat with statistics. Headline says what it says. Detail makes it pretty clear that the whole thing is baloney.

The Smoker’s History site makes it pretty well known (using BOLD LETTERS) that they believe the whole thing is a hoax:

The stock pretension of the morally depraved anti-smoker spin-meisters (who self-righteously spew unadulterated Nazi pseudo-science in our faces) is to pretend that big-money investments by pension funds are a moral issue of profiting from tobacco. In fact, their financial control gives them voting control, and that is how the anti-smokers elect traitors and appoint stooges who let the anti-smokers get away with their scientific frauds to lie the public about the risks of tobacco, support cowardly sell-out politicians, and throw lawsuits so that smokers will be forced to pay outrageous and unjust "damages."

And they add in analysis that smoking is not responsible for heart disease.

They performed no new studies, and merely uncritically regurgitated "published and unpublished data and testimony on the relationship between secondhand smoke and short-term and long-term heart problems." They ignored the CDC and other data on death rates which shows no discernable effect of smoking bans, and which furthermore reveals that the authors of the anti-smoking studies cynically cherry-picked their study periods and control populations. This data is freely accessible to the public, AND TO THE MEDIA, WHO UNQUESTIONINGLY PARROT THEIR FLAGRANT LIES AS TRUTH. (Secondhand Smoke Exposure and Cardiovascular Effects: Making Sense of the Evidence. National Academies Press, 2009.)

The comment on the article that really caught my attention was this one:

By the way, I do not smoke. However, a study has been made (and ‘interestingly’, not published widely) that smokers actually SAVE tax payers money. They live shorter and health care costs are way more in old age. Hence, total cost to taxpayers is actually LESS for smokers (not even counting the extra taxes they pay).