Whose Body Is It Anyway?

• Author: Henderson, David R.

The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette

By Jacob Grier

267 pp.; Jacob Grier, 2019

When I taught benefit-cost analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, one of the first principles I explained was that, to do a good analysis, you need to consider the costs and benefits to the various people affected rather than taking as gospel the desires of policymakers. We studied both good and bad examples of benefit-cost analyses. In the bad ones, a common error was to leave out the gains to consumers when they consumed items that policymakers did not want them to. A typical case was alcoholic beverages; policymakers kept overlooking the enjoyment that consumers receive from a drink.

In his book The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette, independent journalist (and one-time Cato staffer) Jacob Grier avoids that error. Not only does he consider the costs of cigarettes and other forms of tobacco to their users and to nonsmokers, but he also considers the benefits to users. In doing so, he makes a case for people's freedom to smoke or inhale what they want when it does not inflict harm on non-users. Along the way, he details how the antismoking movement has shown its disregard for the interests of smokers. He also shows that the damage from secondhand and "thirdhand" smoke is often overstated and that the harm from e-cigarettes is overstated and the benefits understated. Although I am a dyed-in-the-wool nonsmoker and non-vaper and Grier did not persuade me to try these substances (nor did he attempt to change readers' minds), I learned a lot from this book. You could say that I "rediscovered tobacco."

Health effects research / One of the best parts of the book is Grier's discussion of the use of bad science to support antismoking policies. He tells the story of the apparent health effects of a June 2002 ban on smoking in workplaces, bars, restaurants, and casinos in Helena, MT. During the first six months of the ban, Helena's reported rate of heart attacks fell by 60%. Then, after a judge struck down the law, the reported rate of heart attacks shot back up. Prominent antismoking activist Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, with whom I debated the smoking bans in restaurants on the pages of Econ Journal Watch, touted those numbers in a press release as strong evidence that protecting people from secondhand smoke saves lives. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal carried stories about the Helena experience and people advocating smoking bans seized on the heart attack findings to buttress their case.

Later studies with much larger sample sizes reached different conclusions. A study of a statewide ban in Colorado, for example, which had 5 million residents, found no effect on heart attacks. The study's authors...