Smoke-Filled Rooms: a Postmortem on the Tobacco Deal.

• Author: Lemieux, Pierre
• Position: Book Review

By W. Kip Viscusi

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 263. $27.50 cloth.

Anybody who followed the literature on the "social cost" of smoking over the past two decades must have been deeply puzzled about how state governments could justify their mid- 1990s suits against the tobacco companies, why the latter rushed to settle out of court, and why they finally accepted the 1998 settlement, paying $243 billion for costs that smokers actually never imposed on the public treasury. In Smoke-Filled Rooms, W. Kip Viscusi brilliantly answers these questions and others.

In a few central chapters, Viscusi explains why there is no net cost of smoking to government. Smokers do have higher health care costs while they are alive, but their earlier deaths more than compensate in terms of reduced expenditures for social security, and nursing care. The net cost is negative even without counting excise taxes. Adding those taxes, smokers contribute $0.88 net per pack of cigarettes to the public treasury.

The fact that statistically smokers die younger cannot be ignored if one wants to calculate a meaningful cost. In its litigation Memorandum, the state of Mississippi argued that this sort of calculation "is utterly repugnant to a civilized society" (qtd. p. 87). Viscusi reminds us that "it is the anti-smoking forces and the government lawsuits that initiated this framing" (p. 77). At any rate, even when one does not include these cost savings, tobacco excise taxes are sufficient to make smokers pay for their additional health care.

Viscusi, a Harvard professor and a highly respected expert in the economics of risk, believes the standard medical claim that smokers' risks are "enormous" (p. 7). In contrast, Ralph Harris and Judith Hatton, as indicated in their little book Murder a Cigarette: The Smoking Debate (London: Duckworth, 1998), are among those who argue that the medical risks are "grossly exaggerated" (p. 123). Whatever the scientific truth, P. J. O'Rourke had a point when he said, "Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It's impossible to be alive and safe" (qtd. in Harris and Hatton, Murder a Cigarette, p. 16).

At any rate, one cannot maintain, as have the World Bank and the U.S. states in their litigation, that smokers are uninformed of what the public-health establishment thinks is their risk. As Viscusi's work has shown, much evidence demonstrates that both smokers and nonsmokers...