Ifs and Butts.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Review

How smoking became the target of unfiltered malice

"Smoking is an intrinsic part of modern culture," writes The Wall Street Journal's Tara Parker-Pope in her new book, Cigarettes: Anatomy of an Industry from Seed to Smoke (New Press, $24.95). "For 500 years, smokers and tobacco makers have risked torture and even death at the hands of tobacco's enemies, so it's unlikely that a bunch of lawyers and politicians and the looming threat of deadly disease will fell either the industry or the habit. When the smoke clears from the Tobacco Wars, the last man (or woman) standing may well be a smoker with a cigarette in his (or her) hands."

Parker-Pope deserves credit, because in a discussion as saturated with malice and falsehood as the cigarette debate, expressing even a banal truth requires courage. But don't let the passage fool you: This is the last paragraph of her book, and there is precious little like it in the 167 pages that precede it. It's an afterthought. Had it been the first paragraph, had it been the premise from which she proceeded, Parker-Pope's short, mainstream inquiry into smoking as a practice and as a business in "modern culture" might have staked out some more adventurous journalistic territory.

Assume, as five centuries of evidence amply demonstrates, that many people use tobacco because they want to, that they smoked long before there was an industry to beguile them into it, and that they pursued the practice in the face of potential execution (under certain Otto-man sultans, for example), never mind exorbitant taxation. What then is the most interesting contemporary tobacco business story? Big Tobacco settlements? Hardly. The most interesting--because the most revealing--story involves the immense undercover transfer of cigarettes from (relatively) low-tax regions to high-tax localities.

There is now an exploding black market in smoke all over the world. Europe's Chunnel, for example, is a regular Tobacco Road, delivering more-affordable smokes (and alcohol) to Britain's absurdly overtaxed customers. So much of Canada's tobacco business has shifted to the black market that our neighbor actually lowered its taxes to recoup the loss to its treasury. New Jersey's cops have stopped so many trucks bringing illegal cigarettes north from Virginia and North Carolina that the state has had to build warehouses to contain this "evidence." It is in these warehouses, in the Chunnel, and on the Internet's numerous discount-cigarette sites...