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.