The city’s health commissioner credited the Bloomberg administration’s three-year assault on tobacco use as the force behind a 15% drop in the number of smokers in the five boroughs.

The commissioner, Dr. Thomas Frieden, said the decline, which took place between 2002 and 2004, was linked to the city’s hotly contested ban on smoking in restaurants and bars, its increased cigarette taxes, and the free nicotine patches the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has distributed to 45,000 New York residents.

“It matches what the published literature says will happen when you increase the tax by as much as we increased it by and when you go smoke free,” Dr. Frieden said.

The commissioner called the shrinking population of adult smokers a “success story,” but said the city would continue efforts to reduce the rate. The percentage of adults who smoke in the city dropped to 18.4% in 2004 from 21.6% two years before.

“What 188,000 fewer smokers means is 60,000 fewer people who are going to die on average 14 years earlier from cigarettes,” he said. “So that’s pretty good for a few years work.”

Not everyone believes the sharp decline that the city found through its latest Community Health Survey, an anonymous telephone survey of approximately 10,000 city residents.

The founder of a smokers’ rights group called New York City Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment, Audrey Silk, said proponents of the smoking ban “produce studies that support their policies.”

While Ms. Silk said she did not believe the statistics presented by the city, she, like many others, takes issue with the smoking ban and the taxes, which she sees as an unfair infringement on citizens’ freedom.

“The fact they are using government to manipulate behavior, legal behavior is just contemptible,” said Ms Silk, who also said she was running for mayor on the Libertarian Party platform. “It’s more contemptible than how people feel about smoking.”

The president of the New York Nightlife Association and the co-owner of the nightclub Lotus, David Rabin, said that while he “does not buy much of what the health commissioner says,” he hopes that the increase number of people quitting is true.

The mayor’s two-and-a-half year old smoking ban was seen by many New Yorkers as excessive government intervention. While polls show the majority of New Yorkers are in favor of smoke-free restaurants, bars, and offices, there have been many vocal opponents.

The mayor touted the decline in smoking yesterday. “The cessation of smoking is way ahead of anything we had anticipated, and the number of lives that will be saved because people are smoking less really quite dramatic,” he said.