How Truth Became a Casualty of the War on Smoking.

AuthorSullum, Jacob

WHEN CLARA GOUIN started running the Group Against Smokers' Pollution (GASP) out of her College Park, Maryland, living room in 1971, she was rebelling against social norms she deemed oppressive. "Gouin was a housewife and the mother of two daughters, the youngest of whom had an allergy to smoke," University of Virginia historian Sarah Milov writes in The Cigarette: A Political History. "The child's reaction to cigarettes was so severe that it prevented the family from going out to eat. Even worse than being restricted in public was the expectation that nonsmokers had to accommodate smoking guests in their own homes. Ashtrays in the homes of nonsmokers were monuments to smokers' supremacy. 'What doormats we were!' Gouin recalled thinking as she lay awake one night contemplating nonsmokers' powerlessness."

The understandable grievances of put-upon nonsmokers like Gouin gave birth to a movement that ultimately banished smokers from nearly every place they might want to light up. In many jurisdictions, that includes outdoor spaces. Sometimes it even includes smokers' own homes. Half a century after Gouin founded GASP, as Jacob Grier shows in The Rediscovery of Tobacco, the dwindling minority of cigarette smokers (15 percent of American adults in 2019, per Gallup, down from 45 percent in 1954) is the group with the more plausible complaint of oppression.

Grier--a writer, bartender, and cocktail consultant who enjoys the occasional cigar and pipe but says humanity would have been far better off if the mass-produced cigarette had never been invented--is by no means calling for a return to the situation that Gouin found intolerable. "The proper path," he says, "lies somewhere between ignorant pleasure and outright prohibition."

Grier argues, for example, that state and local governments should allow smoking among consenting adults in certain contexts, such as bars and restaurants that want to offer the option. Even that modest plea is bound to provoke the ire of activists who will settle for nothing less than the "smoke-free society" that C. Everett Koop, surgeon general during the Reagan administration, deemed achievable "by the year 2000." Unlike Milov, who tells the story of the anti-smoking movement mainly as a triumph of public-spirited citizens over conniving capitalists, Grier details the costs of that victory, including unjustified coercion, politicized science, and a fanatical refusal to admit that different kinds of nicotine consumption...

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