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

• Author: LEMIEUX, PIERRE
• Position: Review

For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health By Jacob Sullum New York: Free Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 338. $25.00.

Jacob Sullum's book is a good and carefully documented piece of critical journalism, which should appeal to the layman while providing information and hypotheses to the scholarly student of smoking issues. Not only is the book written by a nonsmoker but it does not defend the tobacco interests, either. An introductory author's note takes pains to explain that tobacco companies had nothing to do with the publication--a wise precaution, for anything financed by the tobacco industry starts with an insurmountable credibility gap, whereas anti-smoking propaganda financed with money stolen by the state comes with an aura of disinterestedness and truth.

This double standard tends to conceal the powerful interests behind anti-smoking crusaders, who are no more disinterested angels than are the tobacco executives. Stanton Glantz, a University of California researcher and cofounder of Californians for Nonsmokers' Rights, is reported as saying, "The main thing the science has done on the issue of ETS [environmental tobacco smoke], in addition to help people like me pay mortgages, is it has legitimized the concern that people have that they don't like cigarette smoke" (quoted by Sullum, p. 147). Wendell Gauthier, a lawyer involved in the 1994 class action lawsuit on behalf of addicted smokers, declared to the New York Times, "Our biggest motivation is money" (p. 205).

Sullum's book offers fascinating insights into the history of smoking, the long-held concerns about its health effects, and the persecutions and prohibitions to which smokers have been subjected. Seventeenth-century preachers described tobacco as "the filthy weed," generating "the smoke of perdition"; smokers were compared to "men possessed, who are in need of exorcizing" (pp. 15, 20). Hatred of the "devil's weed" cut across religions and culture: "It has been said that love is a brief epileptic fit," said Louis XIV's physician, "but smoking is a permanent epilepsy" (p. 22).

Two centuries later, Queen Victoria forced the royal guests who smoked to exhale into fireplaces--which, one should admit, was still more civilized that the current American practice of pushing smokers to the street. In Davis and Palo Alto, California, smoking is prohibited even outdoors within twenty feet of any building open to the public, which means basically everywhere downtown. All public parks in Bellaire, Texas, are nonsmoking areas.

Along with alcohol, smoking was a target of the American temperance movement in the nineteenth century. A lecturer to the New York Anti-Tobacco Society in the 1830s claimed that tobacco leads to "prostration of the mental with the bodily powers," and to a craving for alcohol (p. 25). Later in the century, George Trask, the "Anti-Tobacco Apostle" and founder of the American Anti-Tobacco Society, encouraged young people to take the Band of Hope pledge: "I hereby solemnly promise to abstain from the use of all Intoxicating Liquors as a beverage; I also...