The Tobacco Institute publicly favors restricting smoking to designated rooms or areas, rather than outright bans. But setting up separate rooms designated for smoking can prove very expensive. For instance, setting up specific smoking rooms, improving ventilation systems, and trying to ensure smoke does not drift back into nonsmoking areas can be costly; examples show costs from $5,000 to $80,000 per room. Texas Instruments spent over $500,000 "trying to retrofit its buildings" but did not solve the problem. Companies would have to replace "the volume of air in affected rooms about 250 times more often than it normally is replaced--measures that would increase heating, cooling, and air pumping costs 250-fold.



Salt Lake County (Utah) recently built an enormous new county government complex, partly designed to solve the smoke recirculation problem (smoking was restricted to a few designated areas). Despite an air filtering and circulation system specifically designed with the smoking issue in mind, after less than a year of experience, nonsmokers have complained so often of recirculating tobacco smoke that county officials finally banned smoking throughout the building.

Smoke tends to be drawn back into ventilation systems regardless of earnest efforts to prevent it. Still, the Tobacco Institute says other pollutants, not merely cigarette smoke, cause poor air quality. The Tobacco Institute reports government tests "revealed that 98 percent of air quality complaints were traced to bad ventilation, dirt and bacteria."

Some of the costs of smoking may be counted as individual or personal costs that ought not to be included in overall societal calculations. For instance, May Hayes wrote in Personnel Administrator that "I am not defending the habit of smoking. It's indefensible." Still, she appeals to nonsmokers to acknowledge that smoking is an addiction and hard to quit (she's tried, "many times"). She lists costs such as annoying coughs, holes "burned in our clothes, in our furniture, in our cars," burned fingers, weight gains when smokers stop, tobacco breath, and so on. Still she asks nonsmokers to "stop trying to reform us." Some significant smoking -related costs can be more easily calculated, however. For instance, auto accident rates for smokers are significantly higher than nonsmokers--due to distractions such as lighting up, flicking ashes, smoke haze on inside windshields, smoke in the eyes, and so on.