Federal Policy Mandating Safer Cigarettes: A Hypothetical Simulation of the Anticipated Population Health Gains or Losses

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-25-2004

Publication Title

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management

Volume

23

Issue

4

First page number:

857

Last page number:

872

Abstract

If manufacturing a safer cigarette is technically possible—an open question—then mandating that tobacco manufacturers improve the safety of cigarettes would likely have both positive and negative implications for the nation’s health. On the one hand, removing toxins may reduce the incidence of smoking-related diseases and premature mortality in smokers. On the other hand, smokers might be less inclined to quit, those who have quit might resume the habit, and youth who have never smoked will have one less reason to avoid tobacco use. To assess the expected population health impacts of a legislative or regulatory mandate, we created the Tobacco Policy Model, a system dynamics computer simulation model. The model relies on secondary data and simulates the U.S. population over time spans as long as 50 years. Our simulation results reveal that even if requiring cigarettes to be safer makes smoking more attractive and increases tobacco use, a net gain in population health is still possible.

Keywords

Cigarettes; Computer simulation; Public health; Smoking – Health aspects; Smoking – Law and legislation; Smoking – Prevention; Tobacco use

Disciplines

Civil and Environmental Engineering | Food and Drug Law | Law | Medicine and Health | Public Health

Language

English

Permissions

Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or use interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the article. Publisher copyright policy allows author to archive post-print (author’s final manuscript). When post-print is available or publisher policy changes, the article will be deposited

Publisher Citation

Tengs, T. O., Ahmad, S., Moore, R. and Gage, E. (2004), Federal policy mandating safer cigarettes: A hypothetical simulation of the anticipated population health gains or losses. J. Pol. Anal. Manage., 23: 857–872. doi: 10.1002/pam.20051

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