The following is a list of smoking bans in the United States. For smoking bans and restrictions outside the United States, see the worldwide list of smoking bans.
The United States Congress has not attempted to enact any nationwide federal smoking ban. Therefore, smoking bans in the United States are entirely a product of state and local criminal and occupational safety and health laws.
In 1995, California was the first state to enact a statewide smoking ban; throughout the early to mid 2000s, especially between 2004 and 2007, an increasing number of states enacted a statewide smoking ban of some kind. The most recent smoking ban, as of 2012, is North Dakota's statewide smoking ban, which was ratified by voters on November 6, 2012.
As further detailed in this list, smoking laws vary widely throughout the United States. Some places in the United States do not generally regulate smoking at all, some ban smoking in certain areas and not others, and some ban smoking nearly everywhere, even in outdoor areas (no state bans smoking in all public outdoor areas, but some local jurisdictions do). As of October 5, 2012, according to the American Nonsmokers' Rights Foundation, 81.3% of the U.S. population lives under a ban on smoking in "workplaces, and/or restaurants, and/or bars, by either a state, commonwealth, or local law,", though only 48.7% live under a ban covering all workplaces and restaurants and bars. A smoking ban (either state or local) has been enacted covering all bars and restaurants in each of the 60 most populated cities in the United States except these 16: Arlington, Texas, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Memphis, Miami, Las Vegas, Nashville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Tampa, Tulsa, and Virginia Beach.
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“To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Lovers, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“This world is half the devil’s and my own,
Daft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl....”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“We are told to maintain constitutions because they are constitutions, and what is laid down in those constitutions?... Certain great fundamental ideas of right are common to the world, and ... all laws of man’s making which trample on these ideas, are null and void—wrong to obey, right to disobey. The Constitution of the United States recognizes human slavery; and makes the souls of men articles of purchase and of sale.”
—Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932)
“My opinion is that the Northern states will manage somehow to muddle through.”
—John Bright (1811–1889)