Jacob Sullum
For Your Own Good
The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health
Free Press, 338 pp., $ 25
When I started smoking as a teenager, I knew it was dreadful for my health. This was a few years before the surgeon general’s warning appeared on cigarette packs, but everyone knew smoking was bad. My friends and I talked about the possibility of stunting our growth. We were short, so this was a significant issue. We worried about lung cancer, too. But we smoked anyway. I started with Kents (with the Micronite filter, of course), switched to Lucky Strikes, and at last turned to Salems, which I’d once dismissed as a girl’s cigarette because of the menthol. Then, my smoking career came to an end.
Why had I chosen to smoke roughly a pack a day for more than fifteen years? The answer is simple: Smoking is very enjoyable. Dr. C. Everett Koop, Congressman Henry Waxman, and other enthusiasts of the anti-smoking movement don’t understand this, but it’s true. Smoking is relaxing. You can often do other things better and more pleasurably while smoking — read, watch a basketball game, drink beer, play cards, write. And it doesn’t cause immediate harm. After smoking for an entire evening, you can drive home without wrecking the car. I’m not sorry I quit, given the long-term health consequences, but I’d probably still be smoking were it not for my wife, Barbara. Once a two-pack-a-day smoker, she quit cold turkey after spilling an ash on the head of our first child (the kid wasn’t burned). She made me stop, too.
My experience is similar to that of many, many people I know. But it clashes with the notion of smoking that has come to dominate public policy and has turned smokers — still 25 percent of all American adults — into outcasts. According to this view, smokers are stupid and weak, lured into smoking by clever advertising when they were teenagers. They are not well informed, even now, about how bad tobacco is for them. And they’ve been held hostage by tobacco companies through the addictive power of nicotine.
All of these assumptions are false, but the facts haven’t slowed the anti- smoking movement one bit. Its leaders are convinced they know what’s best for benighted smokers, and they aim to help.
How they go about it is the subject of For Your Own Good, Jacob Sullum’s surprisingly understated tale of America’s health cops in action. Sullum, a senior editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, has written a readable, well-reported account of the near-triumph of anti-smoking zealots in America. I figured a libertarian would stomp mercilessly on tobacco’s foes. But if anything, Sullum is gentler on the anti-smokers than is warranted. He believes they’re “sincere when they say they do not want to ban tobacco — for now.” I don’t believe they are. In fact, I think the evidence in Sullum’s book proves beyond a reasonable doubt that anti-smoking elitists want to destroy the tobacco industry and prevent as many people from smoking as is possible through the coercive power of government.
Sullum is neither a defender of smoking nor a tobacco-industry dupe. But at least he understands the rational calculation that smokers make: pleasure now over the possibility of bad health later. The anti-smokers just don’t get this. As Sullum writes, “The failure of tobacco’s opponents to understand its appeal” amounts to “a blindness.” It causes anti-smokers to distrust average people. It leads them to adopt dubious means to achieve their goal. They are not honest people.
Sullum doesn’t fault the anti-smokers for disliking tobacco advertising, which puts smoking in a positive light. But he does zing them for pretending that advertising causes smoking. The studies about Joe Camel, for instance, show only that kids have heard of him; about 85 percent still don’t like cigarettes. In fact, teenagers begin smoking because their peers and parents smoke, and the kids perceive the risks as small. “Exposure to advertising does not independently predict the decision to smoke, and smokers themselves rarely cite advertising as an important influence on their behavior,” Sullum writes. So why do anti-smokers stress advertising anyway? Because if advertising causes smoking, then individuals don’t make a free choice to smoke. They are victims who must be kept from succumbing to the tobacco industry’s wiles.
What’s more, science is putty in the hands of the anti-smoking movement. Sullum points particularly to the misuse of evidence about “environmental smoke” and addiction to tobacco. Nothing was more important to the enemies of tobacco than establishing that stray fumes harm non-smokers. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of smokers’ hurting themselves, and there’s far less justification for Draconian limits on smoking. But if innocent bystanders are suffering, government has grounds to ban smoking in offices, stores, factories, stadiums, parks, bowling alleys, restaurants, and bars. (Private residences may be next, the excuse being that children are abused by smoke.) The Environmental Protection Agency had to labor long and hard to come up with what Sullum calls “a predetermined conclusion” that environmental smoke is a serious danger. Even when the methodology of studies was changed, the results didn’t show a statistically significant link between ambient smoke and injury to non-smokers. EPA officials trumpeted a connection anyway.
In the matter of addiction, the distortion of science was yet more egregious. The aim of the anti-smokers, according to Sullum, was to show that smokers “are slaves to nicotine rather than independent moral agents.” Thus, the Food and Drug Administration designated cigarettes as “drug delivery devices” in order to bring them under a more restrictive regulatory regime. Yet this is absurd. If cigarettes do nothing more than deliver a drug, Sullum notes, then coffee is simply a caffeine-delivery device. And obviously, there’s a lot more to coffee’s appeal than the caffeine: People gather over coffee, chat, read the paper, and so on. The same is true with tobacco. ” Smoking may be associated with quiet companionship or lively conversation, relaxation or intense work, sex or solitude,” says Sullum. And if nicotine is such an irresistible drug, why are there more former smokers in America than smokers?
The opponents of tobacco don’t have a credible answer to this question, particularly since 90 percent who quit did so on their own, using the old- fashioned method, willpower. The sad thing is the anti-smokers probably don’t need a good answer. The media are totally on their side, spreading every one of “the 10 myths of the anti-smoking movement” that Sullum spells out. After reading For Your Own Good, I’m all the more fearful we’re on a slippery slope toward more government intrusion. Sullum isn’t being facetious when he suggests the next targets will be fatty foods, overeating, drinking, gun ownership, lack of exercise — “anything that can be said to increase the incidence of disease or injury.” Individual taste, already discounted in smoking, won’t be a permissible defense for behavior the health police don’t like.
So get ready. They have plans for you.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
