The following excerpt is from the introduction to The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of The Cigarette, published in 2019 by Jacob Grier. The book is available in print and digital formats from Amazon, Apple, and other retailers.

Audite et alteram partem. [Listen even to the other side.]

Inscription on the old city hall in Gouda, Netherlands

In the late 1980s, the United States began extinguishing smoking on airplanes. “Smoking or non?” became a standard question at restaurants, then disappeared when outright bans took the smoking option off the table altogether. The reach of these prohibitions has extended ever since: to the bar, the restaurant patio, the college campus, the beach, the golf course, the park, the bus stop, the sidewalk, even to the home. More than at any time in modern history, today’s nonsmokers can go about their lives without being subjected to smokers’ fumes.

Few people, myself included, wish to turn the clock back entirely. Though I’m too young to remember smoking on airplanes, it strikes me as guaranteed to make flying unpleasant. As both an employee and patron of bars and restaurants, I’m happy that most of them are now smoke-free. I’m glad that the residents of my apartment building sign lease agreements forbidding indoor smoking, preventing the odor of cigarettes from permeating our living spaces. In hindsight, the extent to which smokers were once permitted to impose their preference onto everyone else appears astonishing.

The banishment of smokers from social spaces has, however, made it almost impossible to contemplate that tobacco deserves any tolerance. Smoking has become a low-status activity. Less than a fifth of Americans currently smoke and the habit lingers mostly among those with less education and lower incomes. Tobacco use is viewed as pure vice and the smoker as a helpless addict, deserving only pity or scorn.

I write from experience on this, having been indoctrinated into holding strongly anti-tobacco views myself. As a child, I pestered smoking cousins to quit before the habit killed them. I bought completely into the view that tobacco is lethal and gross and made it all the way through college without taking so much as a single experimental puff from a cigarette – a rare feat in the philosophy department. My negative perspective on tobacco was unchallenged until I began working in the hospitality industry in one of the first high-quality coffee shops to open in Arlington, Virginia. One of my regulars there, a fitness instructor with an appreciation for well-made espresso and an intimidatingly broad knowledge of food and drink, was also, confusingly to my mind, an avid cigar smoker. On Sunday afternoons he would often step outside with his coffee to light one up. Why, I wondered, would someone who had such great taste and a career in physical fitness risk his palate and his health on those fat stogies? The contradiction perplexed me.

Until, one day, he invited me to try one. I was skeptical, but he talked about his cigars in much the same way that I talked about my coffee. The varietal of the plant and origin of the leaf mattered, with tobacco from Nicaragua tasting differently than tobacco from Brazil or Cameroon. The shade of the cigar wrapper, from light claro to dark oscuro, mirrored the roasting spectrum of coffee beans. He spoke as if hand-rolled cigars made of pure leaf were as far removed from mass-market cigarettes as specialty coffee is from a can of Folgers, suggesting that cigars could be every bit as rewarding as the drink with which I was already enamored.

He was right. Although smoking my first cigar was an unfamiliar experience, I took to it quickly. I remember starting out with a light, approachable Romeo y Julieta and moving on to darker cigars like the imposing Partagas Black. With my friend guiding me through the humidor at the local tobacconist, his Sunday ritual soon became my own. For the next few years we met every weekend to drink coffee, smoke cigars, and read books — out on the patio in good weather, in the backroom of a nearby gastropub when it was raining or cold. The experience was enriching both for the cigar smoke itself and for the thoughtful conversations it reliably drew forth. Today I look back on those Sunday afternoons as some of the happiest moments of my time in Virginia.

Those who wish to eliminate smoking from the world fail to imagine tobacco as a craft product deserving of appreciation and as a wonderful complement to life’s enjoyments. After decades of commodification, consumers have discovered better wine, beer, coffee, cocktails, meat, chocolate, and produce. Specialty stores, farmers markets, diverse restaurants, and craft breweries have made this the most rewarding time ever to be a lover of food and drink in the United States. Yet it’s one of the worst times to be a smoker. Tastemakers and lawmakers alike ignore the desires of smokers and their reasons for keeping up the practice. The proliferation of smoking bans makes it harder than ever to find a place to light up; tax hikes make it increasingly expensive; adoption agencies and employers discriminate against smokers; government regulations favor Big Tobacco over small producers and deadly cigarettes over safer alternatives. Though Philip Morris remains ever profitable, the quality side of the tobacco market is threatened with destruction by the Food and Drug Administration. To those of us who do take pleasure in smoking, this presents a puzzle: How did attitudes toward tobacco get so completely backwards when so many other products are getting so much better?

* * *

At the same time that I was discovering the pleasures of tobacco in Arlington, neighboring Washington, DC, was in the process of passing legislation to ban smoking in bars and restaurants. Though I worked primarily in the service industry, I was also active in various libertarian organizations in the area. Many of my friends in that movement, regardless of their own smoking status, vehemently opposed the measure. A few of them formed Ban the Ban, an organization whose members rallied the opposition with t-shirts and stickers bearing slogans like “Smoking is Healthier than Fascism.”

I sided with Ban the Ban for straightforward libertarian reasons. I believed it was the right of private business owners, employees, and customers to make their own choices about whether to allow smoking. If patrons didn’t like it, they could take their business elsewhere. Even if secondhand smoke was as harmful as anti-smoking activists claimed — a question I hadn’t yet explored — in a liberal society people should be free to make their own bad decisions. That, for me, was enough to settle the issue.

For the Washington, D.C. city council, and many other lawmakers nationwide, that liberty-focused argument was not compelling. Bans spread all over the country, eventually even to tobacco-friendly Virginia where my friend and I enjoyed our Sunday afternoon cigars. As of this writing, forty-three states and more than 22,000 municipalities have enacted bans in hospitality spaces. To secure places for smokers to light up in peace, I realized, a defense of tobacco itself is needed, one that challenges the perception that smoking is pure vice. This set me on a course of researching and writing about tobacco for more than a decade, covering the topic for The Atlantic, Slate, Reason, and other publications.

I found that the landscape of smoking research had shifted considerably since the days when bold epidemiologists took on deceitful tobacco companies to conclusively prove that cigarettes were causing an epidemic of lung cancer. When the companies settled lawsuits with state governments in 1998, they agreed to shut down industry-funded institutes that provided pro-smoking talking points and to funnel tobacco money to anti-smoking researchers and advocacy groups. While this was certainly a positive development in some respects, anti-smoking activists lost an incentive for doing rigorous science when they de-fanged their long-time adversaries. They found themselves free to say anything they wanted without fear of contradiction.

And say anything they did. The more I researched the epidemiology of secondhand smoke, the more I realized how often the claims of anti-smoking activists were wildly exaggerated. Given what we know about the dangers of firsthand smoke, it’s sensible to suspect that secondhand smoke poses some danger, too. But determining exactly how dangerous it is, and at what levels of exposure, has proven to be difficult. Anti-smoking researchers take advantage of this ambiguity to elide any doubts. They cherry-pick data, attack contrary evidence, and magnify tiny risks. Their actions reveal a willingness to sacrifice quality science for the supposedly greater goods of stigmatizing smoking and imposing new restrictions.

One leading researcher, for example, claimed that a smoking ban in the small city of Helena, Montana, had slashed local heart attacks by nearly 60% in just six months. Though wildly implausible, this finding was reported uncritically everywhere from CBS to the New York Times op/ed page. Dubbed the “Helena Miracle” by critics, it has, like all miracles, proved immune to replication on a larger scale. Subsequent research has completely debunked the idea that simply banning smoking in bars and restaurants can achieve such remarkable results. Yet the assertion that bans drastically reduce heart attacks continues to justify increasingly restrictive prohibitions that push smokers ever further to the fringes of society, leaving them with progressively fewer places to go.

Not content with demonizing secondhand smoke, researchers also turned their attention to “thirdhand smoke,” a term for the residue left behind on clothing and other surfaces when someone lights up nearby. For the past decade, thirdhand smoke has featured in countless news stories portraying smokers as objects of revulsion. “Smokers themselves are also contaminated… smokers actually emit toxins,” one researcher explained to Scientific American. In the words of another, smokers are “mobile tobacco contamination packages.” Despite a lack of evidence that thirdhand smoke is a substantial health concern for actual living humans, the concept has been used to stigmatize not just smoking, but smokers themselves, rendering their mere existence in social spaces an unhygienic intrusion.

Anti-smoking ideology now tragically extends to products that emit no smoke at all. A rapidly accumulating body of evidence suggests that products such as electronic cigarettes are far less dangerous than combustible tobacco and that they are helping smokers quit their destructive habit. Instead of embracing these advances, however, anti-smoking groups feed the public a fear-driven narrative that associates vaping with cancer, heart disease, seizures, popcorn lung, exploding devices, dangerous chemicals, and addiction to narcotics. The factual basis for these claims is often tenuous at best. The abstinence-only demands of traditional tobacco control are having a corrosive effect on research into harm reduction, repeating the excesses of the debate over smoking bans and often originating from the same biased sources.

Journalists routinely rely on experts to interpret scientific results, but good journalists must also take the motivations of their sources into account. Years of self-serving manipulation by Big Tobacco accustomed reporters to a simple dynamic: Anything the pro-smoking side claimed was presumed to be a self-serving lie, while anti-smokers were on the side of truth and public health. The press has, with few exceptions, failed to turn a skeptical eye on anti-smoking activism, which today is guided as much by ideology as it is by science. As a result, journalists, politicians, and the public hold beliefs about tobacco, secondhand smoke, and electronic cigarettes that are contradicted by the best and most up-to-date scientific research, and restrictions go far beyond what can be justified by any reasonable interpretation of the evidence. Potentially life-saving products are burdened by excessive bureaucracy, targeted with legal prohibitions, and subjected to moral panic.

The aim of this book is to sort truth from ideology and give tobacco its proper due, beginning with a look at Europeans’ first encounters with the plant — a time when smoking was strange and unknown outside of the Americas, long before the twentieth century rise of Big Tobacco and the inescapable ubiquity of the cigarette. It ends with a look at the innovative products that are revolutionizing the market for nicotine once again. In contrast to most contemporary writing on tobacco, this book looks beyond the public health framing that views smoking as a purely medical problem and denies smokers’ agency and dignity. I take a longer and wider view, drawing on insights from history, sociology, anthropology, epidemiology, economics, law, and political philosophy to provide a more fully developed perspective on smoking and the anti-smoking movement. My approach values both health and liberty, and while acknowledging the real dangers of smoking, it unapologetically refuses to allow the former to run roughshod over the latter.

* * *

An often-repeated anecdote expresses how novel the habit of pipe smoking appeared when it first arrived in England. It usually features Sir Walter Raleigh, though it is also attributed to Richard Tarlton, an actor and clown of the era. Which of the two hardly matters, for the story is almost certainly fictional.

According to the tale, a servant or a couple of passersby see Raleigh or Tarlton exhaling smoke after taking a drag from a pipe. Having never witnessed someone smoking before, they leap to the obvious conclusion: The smoker must be on fire! To save his life they douse the flames with a glass of wine or ale. As the version in Tarltons Jests has it, two men, “’neuer seeing the like, wondreth at it: and seeing the vapour come out of Tarltons nose cryed out, Fire, fire, and threw a cup of Wine in Tarltons face.”

The story is an apt metaphor for our fraught relationship with tobacco. Raleigh or Tarlton, enjoying pipe tobacco for its pleasurable effects, could not have foreseen the tremendous toll in human lives the crop would take centuries later when traditional pipes gave way to modern cigarettes. The naive passersby, splashing wine in the smoker’s face in the false belief that they were doing him a favor, were equally blind to the joys tobacco offers.

Today the dangers of tobacco are well known and the anti-smoking movement, oblivious to the leaf’s redeeming virtues, has acquired some very large tankards of wine with which to drown its use. But the proper path lies somewhere between ignorant pleasure and outright prohibition — a path this book will map in the pages to follow.

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To continue reading, purchase The Rediscovery of Tobacco from Amazon, Apple, or your preferred book retailer.