Thank You for Smoking.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob

ON THE FIRST PAGE OF THANK YOU for Smoking, we get a description of the evil committed by tobacco companies. A speaker at the Clean Lungs 2000 conference is in the middle of introducing Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies. " 'I'm certain that our next...panelist,' the speaker hesitated, the word just too neutral to describe a man who earned his living by killing 1,200 human beings a day. Twelve hundred people--two jumbo jet planeloads a day of men, women, and children. Yes, innocent children, denied their bright futures....Lambs, slaughtered by Nicholas Naylor and the tobacco industry fiends he so slickly represented. More than 400,000 a year! And approaching the half-million mark. Genocide, that's what it was..."

A bit exaggerated, to be sure, but not much different from the rhetoric of anti-smoking activists (or "gaspers," as Nick calls them). Christopher Buckley, a Washington journalist and ex-smoker, appreciates the absurdity of such fulminations, and much of this satiric novel (his fourth) pokes fun at the sanctimony of the anti-smoking movement. The tobacco industry is so besieged by self-righteous paternalists lately that even readers who are inclined to sympathize with the gaspers will find themselves rooting for Nick, weasel though he is.

For Buckley (and, ultimately, Nick), the main sin of the tobacco industry seems to be mendacity, not murder. He has a good time lampooning the sort of evasion and misdirection we have come to expect from representatives of the tobacco industry as they attempt to brush off the suggestion that smoking causes lung cancer or that cigarettes are addictive. Nick, a "puffer" himself, is quick to observe that it's impossible to prove in any given case that smoking caused someone's illness, and he is not above inventing claims out of whole cloth (such as "the report that just came out showing that tobacco smoke is replacing the ozone that has been lost due to chlorofluorocarbons").

In general, the tobacco industry deserves the treatment it gets in Thank You for Smoking. Whether or not they go as far as Nick Naylor, cigarette makers are certainly less than candid about the nature of their product and the risks of using it. But their lies are ridiculous precisely because no one believes them. Indeed, no one is expected to. The tobacco companies refuse to acknowledge the unpleasant facts about cigarettes not because they hope to fool consumers but because they are afraid that...