Up in Smoke: from Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics.

• Author: Heineman, Robert
• Position: Book Review

By Martha A. Derthick Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 260. $21.95 paper.

In Up in Smoke, Martha A. Derthick, former professor of government at the University of Virginia and author or coauthor of several studies of the U.S. policy process, describes and analyzes the events leading to the historic 1998 tobacco settlement with the states. She concludes that these developments constitute an unfortunate movement away from representative democratic negotiation toward a process of "adversariai legalism" that relegates democratic politics to the sidelines of public policy.

Derthick begins by describing patterns of cigarette use in the twentieth century and the growing concerns about the health effects of smoking. The defining moment in this chronology was, of course, the 1964 report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, which concluded that smoking is indeed hazardous to one's health.

Following this report, what Derthick terms the "ordinary politics" of the U.S. policy process began to evolve. Congress moved in its usual halting fashion to educate the citizenry about the health dangers of cigarettes and to control their use. Over the years, it required various forms of warning labels on products, imposed bans on TV and radio advertising, and banned smoking on most domestic airline flights. During the same years, some state and local governments were enacting even more stringent regulations with regard to smoking. In the realm of "ordinary" tort litigation, the tobacco industry had more success. Individual suits against manufacturers made little headway. Plaintiffs against the industry encountered every possible procedural delay, and the costs to individuals in terms of time and money were enormous. Even when litigation reached the trial stage, juries were reluctant to absolve smokers of personal responsibility for their behavior. Nonetheless, Derthick argues, from 1964 to 1993 considerable progress was made in reducing the number of people who smoked.

Toward the end of this period, however, ordinary politics began to take a back seat to "adversarial legalism," an approach greatly aided by forces within the federal bureaucracy. With the appointment of C. Everett Koop as surgeon general, President Ronald Reagan elevated a zealous opponent of smoking to a position of national authority, and by 1984 Koop was calling for a "smoke-free" society by the year 2000. In the early 1990s, David A. Kessler took office as...