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.

In 2018 I was once again tied up with a lot of reading for research, so I had less time for reading on other topics, especially for non-fiction. On the plus side, lots of time spent on trains and airplanes allowed for enjoying a fair amount of novels. As with previous posts, this list reflects books I read in the past year, not necessarily books released in that period.

The Tangled Tree, David Quammen — David Quammen is one of a handful of authors whose books I’ll pre-order as soon as I hear they’re coming out. He’s one of the best science and nature writers and constantly finds new ways to illuminate evolutionary biology. His latest, on horizontal gene transfer, is no exception. Hands down the best non-fiction I read this year.

I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong — This was on my to-read list for a while and after reading The Tangled Tree it seemed like an apt thematic follow-up. It touches on some similar themes, but takes a broader look at the microbiotic life all around and inside us.

Night of the Animals, Bill Broun — I loved this novel and its memorable, unlikely protagonist, an elderly drug-addled man who speaks to animals and plots to free them from the London Zoo. It’s suffused with a re-enchantment of nature in the midst of a bizarre, apocalyptic near future, and I’ve never read anything else quite like it.

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño — I visited Mexico City for the first time this year and consulted Tyler Cowen’s travel tips, where he recommended this as the classic Mexican novel. (Whenever I visit somewhere new, I try to read a novel set there.) A great accompaniment for wandering around the city, and while I’ll probably tackle more Bolano in the future, I’ll likely wait a bit before digging into 2666.

Umami, Laia Jufresa — My other Mexico City pick, an immersive, funny, and delightful story of neighboring families whose lives intersect in shared mews.

The Changeling, Victor Lavalle — Technically I read this in 2017, beginning it on one of the last days of the year and finding myself completely unable to put it down. Genre-bending, compelling, and probably gut-wrenching to read in parts for parents.

Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker — This is definitely lesser Pinker and it comes across as glib and overly simplified in parts. Yet Pinker’s still worth reading, and in a year that was awfully rough on liberalism it’s a useful reminder that many things truly getting better.

Cigarette Wars, Cassandra Tate — The progressive temperance crusade against cigarettes is far less remembered than the fight for alcohol Prohibition, but from 1890 to 1930 fifteen states in the US had enacted some kind of ban on cigarettes. This is a thorough, balanced look at that forgotten movement and why it eventually failed.

In the All-Night Cafe, Stuart David — This memoir of the founding year of Belle and Sebastian is as charming as one would hope a book about Belle and Sebastian to be, and it’s a relatable, wistful meditation on what it’s like to allow one’s own creative endeavors to be overshadowed by another.

A History of Pictures, David Hockney and Martin Gayford — This was as far from my usual topics of interest as any book I read this year, but it’s thoroughly engaging and a pleasure to read, especially with the full-color illustrations throughout.

My latest article for Reason digs a little deeper into the FDA’s plans for tobacco regulation in the United States, including the path that could lead to prohibition of traditional cigars:

Technically, the FDA is forbidden by law from requiring the complete elimination of nicotine in tobacco. But it could mandate that nicotine be reduced to near zero. The FDA says it is considering the pros and cons of “lowering nicotine in cigarettes to a minimally or non-addictive level through the creation of a potential nicotine product standard.” The idea is that new smokers would never get addicted, and current smokers would be forced to quit or turn elsewhere for their fix.

In this scenario, cigarette smokers would switch to e-cigs or similar devices. Realistically, however, many of them will choose to stick with actual tobacco, sourcing it on the black market or buying it in other legal forms such as roll-your-own, pipe tobacco, small cigars, and premium cigars.

Therein lies the threat for people who enjoy smoking any of those products. Cigarette smokers who switch to these instead of e-cigarettes would offset the gains of regulation, inviting further interventions. A rule that began by targeting only cigarettes could end up affecting all forms of combustible tobacco, including premium cigars.

I also flesh out some ideas from a previous post about where debates over tobacco control are headed. Abstinence vs. harm reduction is no longer the most important divide moving forward:

The increasingly aggressive moves by Gottlieb’s FDA reveal the biggest divide in today’s tobacco policy debate. On the one hand, there are people who favor an open, classically liberal approach to regulation that expands the range of choices. On the other, there are advocates of top-down, technocratic planning to reduce it.

Both groups recognize that nicotine products exist on a continuum of harm, with some substantially more dangerous than others. The liberals want to see cigarettes, the most dangerous product on the continuum, suffer creative destruction by voluntary means, with smokers choosing for themselves to take up safer alternatives. Educational campaigns, targeted advertising, and preferential tax treatment could provide additional nudges. The technocrats seek not to nudge but to shove, urging the FDA to manage the market from above by banning some products entirely and coercively rendering others less appealing.

Read the whole thing.