SOME COOL WORDS ON A HOT TOPIC: TOBACCO

Just as the national war on tobacco seems poised to win its most stunning
victories-forbidding smoking just about anywhere save in one's own home or
the great outdoors, and forcing the tobacco companies to pay hundreds of
billions of dollars to governmental agencies for the right to continue
selling a perfectly legal product a few calm voices of reason are being
raised to protest the mounting hysteria.

In mid-December, London's respected Economist magazine warned that "the
attack on tobacco has crossed the admittedly fuzzy line that distinguishes
moral enthusiasm from illiberal vindictiveness, and at such a time good fun
should yield to good thinking
. Because they are nursing their dudgeon and
savoring their victories rather than thinking with care, anti-smokers
believe themselves to be upholding liberal social principles when, in
fact, they are traducing them."

Now there will be published, on April 8, a whole book on the controversy.
"For You Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and Tyranny of Public Health,"
by Jacob Sullum (Free Press), is a calm and comprehensive look at the long
history of attacks on tobacco, with special emphasis on developments in the
past three decades.

As the book's subtitle suggests, Sullum is broadly critical of those
developments, but he never raises his voice and is scrupulously fair to
tobacco's foes. A man who has never smoked a cigarette himself, his
preoccupation with the issue is easily explained by the fact that he is a
senior editor of Reason magazine, a libertarian journal of opinion. For the
convenience of low-minded detractors, however, he has appended an author's
note acknowledging that the R.J. Reynolds company once paid him for the
right to reprint an article he had written on secondhand smoke, and that
Philip Morris has contributed to the Reason Foundation (which publishes
Reason) and has also advertised in the magazine itself. The donations and
ad revenues combined have always totaled less that one percent of the
foundation's budget.

Opposition to tobacco goes much further back beyond former Surgeon General
C. Everett Koop than you may suppose. In 1604, King James I published "A
Counterblaste to Tobacco" ("Shall we
abase ourselves so farre, as to
imitate these beastly Indians?"), and the battle has gone on, hot and
heavy, ever since.

For centuries, tobacco kept on winning; it was only in the middle of this
century, when smoking's causative relationship to lung cancer (which Sullum
readily concedes) became established, that the tide began to turn.

Even then tobacco's opponents faced a logical dilemma. Tobacco's harmful
effects were recognized almost universally, yet nearly a quarter of adult
Americans chose to smoke. By what right could they be ordered to stop?

The answer descended like manna from heaven in 1990, when the Environmental
Protection Administration released a draft of a report classifying
second-hand smoke as a "known human carcinogen," and followed that up in
December 1992 with an estimate that it causes 3,000 cases of lung cancer
every year. The roof promptly caved in on tobacco.

Sullum spends many pages evaluating these superheated allegations, and
concludes that "people who live with smokers for decades may face a
slightly higher risk of lung cancer. According to one estimate, a
nonsmoking woman who lives with a smoker faces an additional lung cancer
risk of 6.5 in 10,000, which would raise her lifetime risk from about 0.34
percent to about 0.41 percent
. [But] there is no evidence that casual
exposure to second-hand smoke has any impact on your life expectancy."

Will a book as calmly and persuasively reasoned as this one have any
perceptible effect on the anti-smoking brigade? I doubt it. With California
already making it unlawful even to open a restaurant or bar exclusively for
smokers, and serviced by employees who smoke, we are past reasoned
argument. Do as you are told.