National press is starting to come in for The Rediscovery of Tobacco. First up, Jacob Sullum reviews the book alongside Sarah Milov’s The Cigarette for the new issue of Reason. From the opening:

When Clara Gouin started running the Group Against Smokers’ Pollution (GASP) out of her College Park, Maryland, living room in 1971, she was rebelling against social norms she deemed oppressive. “Gouin was a housewife and the mother of two daughters, the youngest of whom had an allergy to smoke,” University of Virginia historian Sarah Milov writes in The Cigarette: A Political History. “The child’s reaction to cigarettes was so severe that it prevented the family from going out to eat. Even worse than being restricted in public was the expectation that nonsmokers had to accommodate smoking guests in their own homes. Ashtrays in the homes of nonsmokers were monuments to smokers’ supremacy. ‘What doormats we were!’ Gouin recalled thinking as she lay awake one night contemplating nonsmokers’ powerlessness.”

The understandable grievances of put-upon nonsmokers like Gouin gave birth to a movement that ultimately banished smokers from nearly every place they might want to light up. In many jurisdictions, that includes outdoor spaces. Sometimes it even includes smokers’ own homes. Half a century after Gouin founded GASP, as Jacob Grier shows in The Rediscovery of Tobacco, the dwindling minority of cigarette smokers (15 percent of American adults in 2019, per Gallup, down from 45 percent in 1954) is the group with the more plausible complaint of oppression.

Sticking to that theme, while in New York last fall I sat down for an interview with Monica Burton of Eater to discuss whether smoking bans in hospitality spaces have gone too far. You can read that here.