Category: Uncategorized (Page 7 of 8)

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.

My New Year’s resolution for 2018 was to finish writing my book on smoking. As it turned out, I needed to make the identical resolution for 2019, and this year I finally followed through. As a result, much of my reading this year remained focused on books and articles in that area, as well as on reading and revising my own writing until I could no longer stand the sight of it. The product of that labor is The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette, which I published at last in September. Though I no longer have any desire to read it again myself any time soon, if you’ve come to this post looking for book recommendations, I’ll immodestly lead with that one.

In my free reading time, most of my non-fiction selections reflect the present dismal moment in American politics and a re-evaluation of how I define my own. My views have gone somewhat leftward over the past decade, but in the past few years, especially, my perception of who my allies are has shifted even more pronouncedly left. When I came into the libertarian movement in the early 2000s, the Cold War fusion of libertarians and conservatives was already straining. With the rise of Trumpist nationalism, that break feels complete.

When I worked in DC, it wasn’t uncommon to hear from other libertarians that it would be easier if we could simply refer to ourselves as “liberals” without the stuffy “classical” modifier and without the confused meaning “liberal” had taken on in the United States. With the Trumpian takeover of the Republican party, defending liberalism writ large — in the broad sense that encompasses libertarians, much of the democratic left, and those on the limited government, free market right — has become an urgent cause. The current trajectory of American and global politics has served to increase, for me personally, the salience of the longer, wider, tradition of liberal thought relative to the narrower libertarian movement, even though I situate my own views within both of them.

At the same time, more people on the left now describe themselves as “socialist” or “progressive,” perhaps even viewing liberalism with disdain. The word “liberal,” therefore, seems up for grabs, and feels increasingly comfortable for me personally. This is not a renunciation of the libertarian label — as evidenced by one of the recommendations below, I remain open to even more radical approaches to libertarian thought than I’ve adopted in the past — but I am more willing of late to use the terms liberal and libertarian interchangeably as accurate self-descriptors.

With that digression out of the way, these are the books that stood out for me in 2019. As always, these are books I read this year, not ones that necessarily came out this year.

The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri — This was one of the most consistently recommended recent books among people I follow online, and with good reason. Originally published in 2014 and re-published in 2018, it offers a strikingly prescient analysis of politics through the lens of a technologically empowered public striking out against delegitimized elites. A chapter in the new edition looks back on Trump and Brexit, and considers two possible ways forward: destructive nihilism, or a more decentralized, modest liberal democracy. Thought-provoking throughout, and I highly recommend it; see also this review from Noah Smith and a new post from Gurri examining the events of 2019.

Open, Kimberly Clausing — The subtitle describes this as a “progressive case” for free trade and immigration, though much of it could be aimed just as squarely at trade-wary Trump voters as to Bernie Bros. Clausing persuasively acknowledges the difficulties some parts of the US have suffered adapting to trade, while arguing that new restrictions would only exacerbate their woes. I’d suggest this without hesitation to my progressive friends, but to conservatives as well.

Open Borders, Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith — I loved this book, which is both a compelling argument for immigration and a demonstration of how effective the graphic novel format can be for something like this. (While reading it, I couldn’t help imagining how fun it would be to do a similar treatment of tobacco.) It’s not just economics: It’s also funny and a joy to read, with subtle jokes appearing in the illustrations, and forcefully makes the philosophical and moral case for immigration in ways that economics writing often shies away from.

Why Liberalism Works, Deirdre McCloskey — As an avid reader of McCloskey’s Bourgeois trilogy, I was eagerly anticipating this as a more approachable introduction to her writing and the benefits of what she calls the “Great Enrichment” for those unwilling to take on such lengthy tomes. And it is that, but as a collection of assorted essays rather than a tightly structured argument begun from scratch, I wonder how well it will be received by those not already primed to enjoy her work. Recommended with that caveat.

Technology and the End of Authority, Jason Kuznicki — Part political theory survey, part quietly radical argument for decentering the state’s role in our thinking and using technology to reduce its scope. One of the most provocative paragraphs I read this year: “In any case, however, the state should be understood as a last resort. We ought to be embarrassed rather than proud whenever we reach for the apparatus of government to solve a problem. The use of the state is always an admission that either our other social technologies have failed us or we have prematurely abandoned them.”

Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty — My first dive back into Rorty in well over a decade, at the recommendation of Adam Gurri. Though published in 1998, the discussion of how to balance national pride and shame in a nation’s failings in a way that encourages reform is every bit as relevant today. My preferred reforms would not be Rorty’s, but I found this no less valuable a read for that. (As Adam notes, the book is also a thematic complement to questions raised in The Revolt of the Public.)

Ordinary Vices, Judith Shklar — I was unfamiliar with Shklar’s work until this year, when I picked this up after multiple recommendations online by Jacob Levy. Of most interest here was the essay “Putting Cruelty First,” emphasizing awareness of the potential for cruelty as a fundamental guide for liberals. Or as Levy describes her approach, “Shklar’s was a liberalism motivated not by a summum bonum, an ultimate good, but by a summum malum, an ultimate evil, something to be avoided: namely, cruelty and the fear it inspires.” Compare this with Adam Serwer’s Atlantic article last year, “The Cruelty is the Point.” Of Trump’s many illiberal aspects, his embrace of cruelty and its acceptance by his supporters is the most repulsive.

The Cigarette, Sarah Milov — This history of the cigarette was released within a couple weeks of my own book on tobacco. Points of disagreement will be obvious to anyone who reads them both, so I’ll mention a couple ways in which I think they complement each other. While my book agrees that the shift away from ubiquitous smoking is a good thing, Milov’s more vividly illustrates how difficult earlier decades were for sensitive non-smokers. And though Milov briefly gestures at the downsides of stigmatizing smoking, mine spends much more space exploring the detriments of the anti-smoking movement’s illiberal turn. Reading them together will provide a fuller picture than reading either in isolation. Milov also provides the most in-depth look at the farming side of the cigarette industry that I’ve come across in any books covering the history of tobacco in the United States.

Finally, some brief recommendations for fiction: I loved Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South, guided by this review from The Ringer. The Dispossessed and The Night Manager were my long overdue introductions to Ursula K. Le Guin and John le Carre, respectively, and I plan on reading more Le Guin in particular this year. I read Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors on a trip to Denmark and enjoyed its portrayal of a conflicted woman from Jutland trying to make a life in urban Copenhagen. The Final Solution is a charming, affecting mystery from Michael Chabon starring a familiar detective, veering into a chapter told from a very surprising perspective that he pulls of remarkably well. Update: I’d meant to include Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, too, which is as good as everyone says it is.

New from me at the Washington Examiner:

As the federal government has backed away from a ban on flavored e-cigarettes, opponents of the products are shifting their attention to state and local levels. It’s easy to understand the reasons for concern: Vaping is novel, we’re protective of the youth, the wave of lung illness is frightening, and the carnage caused by cigarettes has made us wary of nicotine in any form. But getting risk right requires taking a step back, calmly evaluating the evidence, and not giving in to panic.

Read the rest for my op/ed-length case for refraining from banning e-cigarettes.

Will panicked reactions to the so-called “vaping lung illness” result in more premature deaths than the illness itself? Today at Slate, I explain how fear-driven responses to events like terrorism, nuclear disaster, and the current outbreak can lead to policies and behaviors that actually end up increasing risk:

In a paper from 2002, psychologists Paul Slovic and Elke Weber describe these sorts of reactions to frightening events as the “social amplification of risk.” They note that when an unexpected danger arises, “the adverse impacts … sometimes extend far beyond the direct damages to victims and property and may result in massive indirect impacts such as litigation against a company or loss of sales, increased regulation of an industry, and so on. … Thus, the event can be thought of as a stone dropped in a pond. The ripples spread outward, encompassing first the directly affected victims, then the responsible company or agency, and, in the extreme, reaching other companies, agencies, or industries.” Through this process of social amplification, relatively minor risks can result in disproportionate or mistargeted responses.

Read the rest here.

Also, while I was in DC last month I sat down with Trevor Burrus of the Free Thoughts podcast for a discussion of my new book, The Rediscovery of Tobacco. Listen here or read the transcript.

Better late than never, I’ve finally arranged a book release event for The Rediscovery of Tobacco. After giving some thought to the venue, I realized there was only one ideal spot to host it: The Horse Brass Pub, whose former owner Don Younger was the most outspoken opponent of Oregon’s smoking ban. He and his bar feature in chapter five of the book, which focuses on the spread of smoking bans and the ways in which class influences who is forced to abide by them. Much against Don’s wishes, the Horse Brass is now smoke-free by fiat of the state, so attendees won’t have to worry going home smelling like smoke. I’ll be selling and signing books from 6:00-8:00 pm on Monday, November 4th. For those so inclined, we’ll likely head elsewhere after for celebratory cigars.

My most recent piece for Reason draws on themes in my book to explain how the previous decade’s debates over smoking bans illuminate today’s moral panic about vaping. Read it here.

While I was in DC recently, I had the pleasure of recording a live podcast with Caleb Brown of the Cato Institute, which is now available for streaming online. I’ve also spoken with Mitch Kokai of the John Locke Foundation and Brent Stafford of RegWatch.

Finally, the first local coverage of my book has come from Mark Fogerson of Portland Monthly, who met with me to discuss cigarettes, cigars, smoking bans, vaping, and related issues.

It’s called The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette. It looks like this:

Here’s the brief description:

The cigarette is the most lethal consumer product in history. The movement to extinguish smoking, however, has become alarmingly illiberal. Smoking bans have spread beyond restaurants and bars to parks, beaches, and sidewalks; rising cigarette taxes rob the wages of society’s least well-off; moral panic threatens smokers’ access to potentially life-saving e-cigarettes; and smokers are discriminated against, stigmatized, and made to feel unwelcome in society. What if there’s a better way? The Rediscovery of Tobacco is a moderate manifesto against the extremes of the anti-smoking movement. This contrarian take on smoking makes the case for respecting the choices of consenting adults, acknowledging the genuine pleasures of pipes and cigars, and encouraging an innovative market for lower-risk competitors that will finally end the deadly reign of the cigarette.

This has turned out to be an eventful week to release the book. Michigan, New York, Washington, DC, and other jurisdictions are enacting or contemplating bans on flavored e-cigarettes. The FDA has announced its intention to ban them nationwide. In Michigan, anyone found in possession of four or more flavored vapor devices could be imprisoned for up to six months. India — a country with more than 100 million smokers — has just banned the sale of vapor products, with penalties for offenders reaching up to three years in prison.

How did things get so bad, so quickly? Well, that’s part of why I wrote the book. The evidence that the anti-smoking movement has become dangerously illiberal has been mounting for years. For the past two decades, this has manifested primarily in alarmist claims about secondhand smoke and boundlessly expanding smoking bans. As smoking has become concentrated among the least well-off, it’s been easy for most people to ignore the stigma that now attaches to the habit and the ways that we increasingly infringe on smokers’ liberties. But as governments react to the moral panic over vaping by banning lower-risk alternatives to the cigarette and threatening to imprison sellers of nicotine products, it has become imperative to question the dominant, dogmatic approach of professional tobacco control.

After years of ignoring smoking and smokers, vaping has suddenly brought nicotine back to the public’s attention. Unfortunately, the contemporary debate often lacks the historical context needed to make sense of the conflict. Hence, The Rediscovery of Tobacco takes a longer and wider view, tracing tobacco back to its origin in the Americas and the diverse ways it was put to use around the world. It turns next to how a single product — the manufactured cigarette — came to take over the market, with disastrously lethal consequences. From there it explores secondhand smoke, smoking bans, and the ways in which the anti-smoking movement began replacing rigorous science with ideological fervor. It then moves on to the changing landscape of tobacco regulation, detailing how the biggest tobacco companies shape seemingly public-spirited laws to work to their advantage. This leads into the heated question of tobacco harm reduction and why many leaders in public health are so hostile to products that massively reduce users’ exposure to toxic tobacco smoke. Finally, the book concludes with a case for a more liberal, tolerant, and open approach to nicotine and tobacco use, in opposition to the increasingly authoritarian and technocratic demands of tobacco control.

This is not a book about vaping per se, although it does devote a lengthy chapter to that topic. Reading it may, however, challenge the way you think about the current debate. Its arguments are contrarian, and I don’t expect them to be convincing to everyone. But they are made in good faith, and if you approach them in the same spirit, I’m optimistic that you’ll find them worth engaging.

As I write in the book:

More than 34 million Americans over the age of 18 currently smoke. Around 10 million use e-cigarettes. To avoid the mistakes of previous prohibitions and drug wars, it’s necessary to recognize these people not as pathological addicts but as equal citizens.

The Rediscovery of Tobacco is my attempt at elucidating what that entails and the various ways we often fall short of that ideal. The book is available for order right now in hardcover, paperback, and digital. More purchasing options will be coming soon, and I’ll update this post as they go live.

Today at Slate, I wrote about how the panic over e-cigarettes works to the advantage of big tobacco companies. There’s the obvious way that’s true: Many vapers would, if e-cigarettes were banned, go back to actual tobacco. But there’s also a lesser-known reason:

Tobacco products are regulated by the FDA, but they are not regulated as a food or a medicine. The separate framework for regulating tobacco was established by legislation that was quietly negotiated and supported by Philip Morris, maker of the bestselling Marlboro cigarettes, more than a decade ago. “The name of the game was getting the bill, not getting the credit,” an executive explained at the time. One can speculate about the company’s motives, but a likely one is that it knew the law it was pushing for would create barriers to entry for potential competitors. This would position the tobacco giant as one of the few companies capable of navigating the FDA’s costly and opaque approval process. (The high barrier to entry is part of why there are currently no FDA-approved e-cigarettes on the market.)

The FDA itself has predicted that the eventual costs of compliance for e-cigarettes will be “high enough to expect additional product exit, consolidation, and reduction in variety.” The agency didn’t even release final guidance on what to include in applications until this past June. In fact, there is only one e-cigarette–like product that has ever made it through the regulatory pathway set forth for these devices, and that is IQOS, a product owned and developed by Philip Morris International that will make its United States debut in Atlanta as early as this month. Which means that if the FDA immediately bans unapproved e-cigarettes, it will be handing Philip Morris a monopoly on the American market.

Read the rest here.

2019 was the summer of not blogging, as my site fell victim to my lax WordPress update schedule. It was hit with some malicious code and I needed to take it down for a few months while I worked on other things. It’s finally back online now with a newer, cleaner design. I’ve put up a few of the most recent posts and will be restoring the rest of the archives in due course, assuming all goes well.

Does this mean I’ll be blogging more often? Maybe. More importantly, watch this space for news about my latest project, coming very soon.

Everyone is being mean to Howard Schultz since he announced his presidential ambitions, so I wrote something a little nicer for the Washington Examiner. An excerpt:

Though it seems weird to think about now, there was a time when people genuinely worried that Starbucks would kill off all the local coffee shops. “Starbucks’ policy is to drop ‘clusters’ of outlets in urban areas already dotted with cafés and espresso bars,” warned Naomi Klein in her 1999 book No Logo. “This strategy relies just as heavily on an economy of scale as Wal-Mart’s does and the effect on competitors is much the same.” The company’s aggressive approach to real estate deals was seen as an unfair competitive advantage and brought on at least one antitrust lawsuit from an aggrieved coffee shop owner.

As recently as 2007, the idea that local shops could not only survive but even thrive in competition with Starbucks was taken as Slate-worthy contrarianism. But as was evident even then, America’s appetite for specialty coffee wasn’t a fixed pie to be divvied up between mom and pop shops and big corporations. Schultz’s company helped nurture a market that had barely existed before, introducing Americans to unfamiliar Italian (or at least Italian-ish) espresso drinks in a comfortable atmosphere.

For a longer, more detailed take, see also my 2008 piece from Doublethink.

My first piece of the year is up at Slate, taking a look at how decades of stigmatizing smoking now clouds the current debate over vaping:

This is particularly fascinating because the innovations that make safer nicotine consumption possible arrived in a time of cultural realignment with regard to the use of various psychoactive substances. University of London historian Virginia Berridge has noted that western societies are increasingly willing to distinguish between “use” and “problem use” for cannabis and some other illegal drugs. And yet still, any use of tobacco is seen as inherently problematic. “Tobacco was changing places to become more like a drug, while drug use itself was becoming ‘normalized’ and part of a wide spectrum of substance use in society,” writes Berridge in her 2013 book Demons, which tracks attitudes toward alcohol, tobacco, and drugs from the early 19^th century to the present day. “From the 1980s onward, new ideas about drug use tended to see it as more ‘normal’ while tobacco smoking became seen as pathological.”

These attitudes are so pervasive that they’ve ended up threatening the most promising product yet for tobacco harm reduction, forcing vapor advocates into a defensive posture couched in purely medical terms. And while the harm reduction case for e-cigarettes is compelling, I’d like to suggest a more radical proposal for how we should approach regulating the product: recognize adults’ ownership of their own bodies. Approach vaping not as mere medicine (it’s more than that) or just another form of smoking (it’s much safer), and treat it as one of many moderately risky activities that consenting adults should be free to engage in.

Read the whole thing.