Jacob Grier doesn’t like cigarettes. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes. He
advises people against smoking cigarettes. And yet he believes that adults
should be allowed to smoke cigarettes without being harassed, demonised,
over-taxed and thrown out of every building in America, including, in some cases,
their own home. This view, which was once so uncontroversial as to go without
saying, makes him virtually a libertarian provocateur today. In The
Rediscovery of Tobacco, Grier explains how this cultural revolution
happened.
It
is unusual for governments in modern democracies deliberately to encourage
intolerance and animosity towards a large group of fellow citizens, but that is
effectively what happened when ‘denormalisation’ was embraced as a
tobacco-control strategy. The restraints of the US Constitution mean that many
of the policies available to anti-smoking campaigners elsewhere, such as
advertising bans and plain packaging, are out of reach, and so, rather than
targeting the product, American crusaders have forcefully targeted the
consumer.
It is the petty vindictiveness of
America’s ever-expanding network of smoking bans that really irks. There will
soon be nowhere left to hide. If it is not obvious to you that most
‘smoke-free’ laws are contrivances to force smokers to quit, rather than to ‘protect’
nonsmokers, this book will surely persuade you. It is almost comic to watch the
quackademics of ‘tobacco control’ garrotting science to justify bans on smoking
outdoors and in private dwellings. When the dubious epidemiology of secondhand
smoke outlived its usefulness, the concept of thirdhand smoke was invented to
persuade the public that they are at risk from anything that had ever come into
contact with smoke: furniture, carpets, wallpaper and, most pertinently, the
clothes, hair and skin of smokers themselves. In the land of the free,
campaigners would rather encourage mass hypochondria than admit to being
paternalists.
The
mere sight of someone smoking is viewed as sufficiently dangerous to justify
criminalisation. When New York City’s health commissioner wanted to ban smoking
in Central Park in 2010, he asserted that ‘families should be able to bring
their children to parks and beaches knowing that they won’t see others
smoking’. The ban was introduced the following year.
By
the time vaping became a mainstream activity in the early 2010s, the
anti-smoking lobby was well practised in the art of manipulating public
opinion. The greatest harm-maximisation innovation of the century was no match
for people who could get away with making three preposterous claims before
breakfast. By 2019, a steady stream of junk science and outright lies from
supposed ‘public health’ groups had convinced two-thirds of Americans that
e-cigarettes were as hazardous or more hazardous than traditional cigarettes.
The
anti-smoking fanatics get away with it, Grier argues, because they have had no
accountability since the turn of the millennium. By the mid-1990s, the
American tobacco industry had become a byword for corporate malfeasance. By the
end of the decade, cigarette companies had finally stopped trying to dispute
the addiction and harm associated with their products and closed down front
groups such as the Tobacco Institute. On the face of it, this was no great loss
to smokers, but one effect of the industry withdrawing from the stage was to
leave the anti-smoking lobby free to say almost anything. The threat of
having their work picked apart by the Tobacco Institute ‘helped enforce rigour
in anti-smoking research in much the same way that the adversarial process in a
courtroom trial forces both sides to justify their claims with evidence’.
Without it, it was open season for junk scientists.
Meanwhile,
the spectacular collapse in trust in the industry gave the media the only story
about smoking it would ever need. It became a simple morality tale in which
there was no doubt about who the goodies and baddies were. Those who called for
greater restrictions on smoking wore a halo, while those who defended smokers’
rights were suspect. Journalists were understandably anxious not to be fooled
again, but their lack of scrutiny of the anti-smoking side amounted to giving a
free pass to extremist cranks and fostered ‘a scientific environment in which
research is judged primarily for its usefulness in promoting the goals of
tobacco control, dissent is punished by personal attacks, and dubious claims
about the effects of second- and thirdhand smoke can be made with impunity,
sure to receive favourable press coverage by reporters eager to write a
shocking headline’.
They
get away with it for other reasons, too. Class prejudice, for example. With
cigarette smoking increasingly concentrated among the working class, smoking
bans became tools of social engineering and gentrification. In the US, as in
Britain, ‘smoke-free’ laws led to the mass closure of the kind of bars the
upper classes were never likely to step foot in. Outdoor smoking bans gave the
police licence to harass the homeless and helped clear the streets of
undesirables. The ban on smoking in public housing, enacted in 2018, left
homeowners well alone. Meanwhile, casinos, golf courses and high-end cigar bars
got exemptions.
And then there is money. Lots of money. A
handful of British anti-smoking groups are funded by the state, and every
government relies on tobacco taxes to some extent, but the financial corruption
in the US is off the scale. The Master Settlement Agreement of 1998
requires tobacco companies to make annual payments to state governments in
exchange for immunity from personal injury lawsuits. These payments rise and
fall in line with tobacco sales and many states have invested in tobacco bonds,
thereby giving them a perverse incentive to keep people smoking. Major
anti-smoking organisations such as the Truth Initiative also depend on the
Master Settlement Agreement for their income. Add into the mix pharmaceutical
companies who have their own nicotine products to sell, and you have a
Bootleggers and Baptists tragicomedy, with consumers picking up the tab.
The
genius of anti-smoking policy from the 1990s onward was to portray the war on
tobacco as a crusade against the tobacco industry, thereby sidelining the views
of millions of ordinary smokers who wanted nothing more than to be left alone. While the tobacco industry continued
making piles of money, and the anti-tobacco industry kept the grant cheques
rolling in, it was individuals and small businesses who bore the brunt.
Grier is familiar with the pain of
both, having worked as a bartender in Virginia and Oregon and being cured of
his anti-smoking tendencies when he discovered the joy of pipes and cigars. ‘By
any honest accounting,’ he writes, ‘my life has been enriched by the enjoyment
of tobacco. To pretend otherwise would be a lie.’ He is puzzled by the way in
which the pure enjoyment of smoking never seems to enter the equation. And if
people enjoy it, why shouldn’t they be free to do it?
The answer
from ‘public health’ activists is that they do not enjoy it and that smokers do
not ‘possess any freedoms to be meaningfully infringed’. When legislators in
Hawaii proposed raising the minimum age for purchasing cigarettes to 100 (yes,
you read that correctly), the bill stated that: ‘Banning the sales of
cigarettes should be viewed as a good-faith effort to free smokers from the
enslavement of this powerful addiction and not an infringement on
individual liberties.’
Grier is an engaging and knowledgeable
writer with a solid grasp of history and science. His analysis of the modern
anti-smoking movement as ‘a contemporary manifestation of the old-time
temperance movement, wrapped in the modern clothing of epidemiology but with
the same tired contempt for individual liberty’, is surely correct.
Resistance
seems futile when fanaticism has become institutionalised at the highest level
of American society – the Food and Drug Administration is currently
contemplating the ultimate harm-reduction measure of removing nicotine from
cigarettes – and yet Grier sees a glimmer of hope. The cigarette, he says in an
unusually judgemental passage, is a ‘terrible product’. He views its rise in the
early 20th century as a tragic historical accident that will be corrected when
safer nicotine products take over the market. Cigarettes may have been dominant
for over a century, but this is a small window of time in the long history of
human consumption of tobacco. He thinks it likely that e-cigarettes, heated
tobacco and other low-risk nicotine devices will make the combustible cigarette
obsolete in this century.
I’m sure this will happen in some
countries, but perhaps not in the US where the anti-smoking lobby has become an
anti-nicotine lobby and the message to smokers is ‘quit or die’.
Christopher
Snowdon is the co-host of Last Orders, spiked’s
nanny-state podcast.
