Cigarettes are the deadliest consumer product in the world. Researchers have known this since rigorous studies established the link between smoking, lung cancer, and other diseases in the 1940s and ’50s, and there has been no reasonable basis for doubt among the wider public since the landmark surgeon general’s report of 1964. Yet smoking persists, and Big Tobacco remains a reliably profitable business. This is the tobacco paradox: Decades of bad news for the cigarette industry have somehow not led to terribly bad news for its bottom line.
How Big Tobacco thrives despite an onslaught from scientists, activists, and lawmakers is one of the intriguing topics explored in Joshua Knelman’s engaging new book Firebrand: A Tobacco Lawyer’s Journey. The lawyer remains unnamed, referred to throughout only as “the lawyer,” a literary device that reflects both the opprobrium attached to tobacco lawyers in North America and the genesis of the story as a series of conversations between the lawyer and the author after the former’s exit from the industry. (In real life, the lawyer has revealed himself as Max Krangle, now the owner of a business consulting firm in Toronto.)
At the beginning of the lawyer’s career, the regulatory hammer is poised to fall on smoking in Europe. His job is compliance, so the company sends him into the field to learn all aspects of the tobacco business. At the high end, that included treating major buyers to days out at the Formula One Grand Prix. Less glamorously, it meant spending days with the local drive team in England, tagging along as they go shop to shop striking small-time deals and begging permission to rearrange store shelves to put the company’s brands at eye level. In between, there’s dining on sheep’s head in Kazakhstan and getting up close with the arbitrage business in Spain, where smokers flock from Britain and France to take advantage of lower tax rates.
Some of the marketing practices discussed are now firmly in the past tense or at least much less prevalent than they used to be. This provides part of the explanation for the tobacco paradox. The cutthroat marketing of the cigarette business was only partially about hooking new users; it was also about fighting rivals for market share. If one company was sponsoring race teams and blanketing shops with branded swag, its competitors had to do the same.
The imposition of advertising restrictions forced a detente, allowing the companies to forgo massive advertising expenditures and lay off much of their ad teams. Knelman explains that the Master Settlement Agreement in the United States, portrayed by press and politicians as a deadly blow to Big Tobacco, caused more pain for the businesses that profited from its advertising largesse. “The players hit hardest by those restrictions were actually the ad agencies, along with magazines, cultural and sporting organizations, and television networks. No more cash from Big Tobacco.” The cigarettes continued to sell themselves.
Similarly, the massive financial penalties imposed by the settlement — more than $200 billion in the first 25 years and extending into perpetuity — bought the industry immunity from state lawsuits and practically paid for themselves. “On the surface, the industry was being punished for its sins, but it wasn’t really so bad,” writes Knelman. The settlement essentially cartelized the industry, allowing companies to pass the costs of the payments on to smokers. “[It] was a team effort; the government and the tobacco companies were both raising the price on each pack sold.”
Although Knelman doesn’t use the phrase, many of the scenarios described exemplify what economist Bruce Yandle described as a “bootleggers and baptists” dynamic. This is when anti-vice laws, such as blue laws against alcohol sales advocated by Baptists, end up benefiting the providers of vice, such as the bootleggers who smuggle illicit booze.
Firebrand’s exploration of these issues stops short by neglecting how this dynamic has affected regulation of e-cigarettes, which get only a passing mention in the book despite fitting well into its overall theme. Regulation of tobacco by the Food and Drug Administration, a policy that was clandestinely backed by Philip Morris and Altria, has left combustible cigarettes virtually untouched while grinding smaller producers of safer products out of business.
Knelman is acutely aware of both the pleasure of smoking and the enormity of its cost; though the habit has been driven out among upper classes in North America and Europe, he notes that “there are now more smokers — not fewer — than at any time in history: of the 7.8 billion people on Earth, over 1 billion of them smoke.” Alas, the prospect of safer nicotine products displacing deadly cigarettes gets short shrift. Knelman focuses instead on more and stricter prohibitions. Given the proven track record of tobacco harm reduction, the world’s 1 billion smokers deserve better.
But this is not a book that’s intended to go deep into the weeds on policy prescriptions. Nor does it dwell too much on the morality of working for Big Tobacco. The lawyer is confronted with personal dilemmas about the ethics of his job only sporadically, and there’s nothing profound about his motivations for doing it: It’s legal, lets him travel the world on the company’s dime, provides him and his family a comfortable life in Switzerland, and makes him rich.
Firebrand succeeds best as a tell-all and travelogue, providing an inside look at an industry in transition, one that’s still raking in big bucks even as its glamour is in steep decline. Readers looking for detailed policy analysis or introspective character study can seek it elsewhere. This is the most fun book on the tobacco business since Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking, with the added virtue of being grounded in real experience.
Jacob Grier is the author of several books, including The Rediscovery of Tobacco, Cocktails on Tap, and Raising the Bar (forthcoming with Brett Adams).
