For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health

National Review, March 23, 1998 by Mark Cunningham

For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health, by Jacob Sullum (Free Press, 338 pp., $25)

Mr. Cunningham is associate editorial-page editor at the New York Post.

IN my 16 years as a regular smoker, I've quit twice. It's a filthy habit that takes years off your life (three to seven, on average) and degrades your health in the meantime. And I've gone back twice, because nicotine is a wonderful drug, and cigarettes perhaps the best drug-delivery device known to man.

I savor the bitter taste and dusty feel of the smoke as it enters first my mouth and then my lungs; my spirits rise even with the tiny buzz the habit now provides. It picks me up when I'm feeling down, and adds to the joy of fine food, good drink, heartfelt conversation -- of almost everything the good LLord put on this earth for our delight. It helps me think.

Consider: nicotine is a mood stabilizer that also enhances short-term concentration. Alternately a stimulant and a depressant (and, miraculously, almost always the one you need), it never has so strong an effect as to be disruptive. Meanwhile, the device -- fire on a stick that you can hold between two fingers, with smoke you can expressively exhale -- has a host of subsidiary uses: the perfect gesturing prop, nervous-fiddling toy, meditation focus, and more.

Smoking doesn't suit everyone. Some people want to live eight or nine decades; they actually believe, I guess, in "the golden years." Others are keen to run marathons, or value their sense of smell, or dread lung cancer. I don't insist they share my habit, and will happily refrain or move at the first complaint. Can't they in turn leave me alone?

In the work at hand, Jacob Sullum examines the reasons now given for interfering in my pleasure. Sullum does not himself smoke; indeed, second-hand smoke bothers him more than it does most people. Rather, his motive is a rationalist's pique at the truly irrational -- those who think themselves fit to make decisions for everyone else, who refuse to grant the possibility that reasonable people can freely choose to stick with a deadly habit. And For Your Own Good makes a compelling case that non-smokers also ought to be concerned about the principles promoted by the anti-smoking crusaders.

To start with, Sullum points out that, although science has deepened our knowledge of the vice's ill effects, it has not opened fundamentally new ground: people have always known what every child now knows: "It's bad for you." James I published "A Counterblaste to Tobacco" in 1604, shortly after taking the throne of England. Cotton Mather denounced the habit, too. The individual counts of the indictment -- complaints about second-hand smoke, warnings of the addiction's irresistible power, etc. -- have equally lengthy pedigrees. Fond nicknames like "coffin nails" and "little white-slavers" predated the 1964 Surgeon General's Report by half a century.

Of course that report made a difference: U.S. smoking rates have been dropping ever since. (Indeed, they had begun falling before then, thanks to the publicity given the studies on which the report was based. Other factors may have played a role -- smoking rates jump in wartime, when life is cheaper and pleasure more dear; a postwar drop could thus have been expected.) As a result, America today holds more ex-smokers than smokers.

That simple fact pretty much destroys one of the core premises of the anti-smoking fanatics -- the idea that the state must save us helpless addicts from an evil outside force. Another claim, that the government must prevent the tobacco companies from deceiving us, is falsified by another truth: No one believes them, in the face of the ample information available on the risks of smoking. (Indeed, surveys by Harvard economist W. Kip Viscusi show that even smokers overestimate the habit's health risks.)

What about second-hand smoke? The research to date indicates that it presents at most minuscule risk, and only to those who live with smokers for decades. The Environmental Protection Agency report that found otherwise was the result of blatant, essentially political, violations of standard scientific procedure. Similarly, the then commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David Kessler, had to twist logic and the plain language of the law in order to make his own pronouncements on his "obligation" to classify cigarettes a "drug-delivery device" and therefore to issue FDA regulations concerning them.

These crusaders may privately rationalize their dishonesty as fighting fire with fire -- countering the tobacco industry's lies and hardball legal tactics. But the corruption runs deeper.

Take the tactic that actually brought Big Tobacco to its knees (or at least to the bargaining table that produced the famous "settlement"): state attorneys general suing cigarette makers to recover the "extra" funds the states "had" to spend on Medicaid care for smokers. This conveniently ignores the primary moral liabilities -- of those who choose to smoke, knowing the risks as well as or better than they do the risks of any other activity we undertake, and of the states, for choosing to subsidize individuals' health-care costs. Beware, ye other merchants of premature, politically incorrect death -- ye distillers, fatty-food distributors, gun-makers, auto-makers.