For the Washington Examiner, I reviewed Mark Shrad’s excellent new book on the global history of Prohibition and temperance movements:

Chapter one of Mark Schrad’s new book opens with a gut-wrenching episode of state brutality. It’s 1859 in Spassk, Russia, and the tsar himself has dispatched the military to put down a protest of rebellious serfs. Gen. Yegor Petrovich Tolstoy responds ruthlessly, ordering imprisonment, court-martial, hourslong beatings, running of the gantlet, forced labor, and exile to Siberia for the noncompliant. This violent abuse of serfs in the Russian empire is not surprising, but for modern readers, the motivation for their protest likely is. The act of civil disobedience that brought the wrath of the state upon them was their refusal to drink alcohol.

The incident is smartly chosen by Schrad, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, to startle readers out of their preconceptions about Prohibition. In Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, he seeks to change the way we think about temperance movements by recognizing that they were neither exclusively American nor only the work of rural, white, busybody Protestants. Schrad reveals temperance as a global phenomenon and attempts to reclaim Prohibition, for better or worse, as a fundamentally progressive cause.

At Liberal Currents, reflecting on the policy disaster of the FDA banning or failing to authorize for sale nearly all e-cigarettes, I made a liberal case for respecting the agency of smokers:

Now that the fights over smoking bans have been won and given way to debates over harm reduction, I find that advocates of the latter don’t much like to talk about the former. They’d rather focus on the present and the deep divide in tobacco control between those who support harm reduction and those who pursue a more prohibitionist approach. But this divide didn’t arise by chance; it’s the inheritance of decades in which the field tolerated the publication of bad science, punishment of dissent, and stigmatization of the very people it supposedly sought to help, so long as doing so advanced its political aims. Unfortunately, those strategies were wildly successful. Thus today, when smokers and vapers desperately need someone to defend their liberties, their allies are unequipped to offer effective support.

I covered the FDA’s mishandling of this for Reason as well:

It should be obvious that this is an irrational way to regulate vaping given that the relevant comparison is to lethally dangerous cigarettes, which remain widely available and essentially unchanged after 12 years of FDA regulation. Yet because the anti-smoking lobby has spent years encouraging moral panic about vaping and decades denigrating the rights of tobacco and nicotine consumers to make their own decisions, the pointless prohibition of a wide swath of far safer nicotine products will likely proceed without much protest from anyone but the small minority of vapers themselves.

Also at Reason, I covered a fight about direct shipment of spirits in California, which turned out (at least in the short-run) in favor of consumers and distillers.

For the European magazine Cigar Journal, I explained the complicated challenges facing American cigar regulation (oddly missing paragraph breaks in the online version). Also on the topic of cigars, I visited Ybor City in Tampa for Inside Hook:

If you’ve been smoking cigars for a couple decades, chances are you’ve noticed that finding a place to light up is increasingly difficult. The first statewide smoking ban in bars arrived in California in 1998, and the trend has accelerated ever since. Twenty-eight states now have comprehensive indoor smoking bans on the books. So do more than a thousand American cities and counties. Want to smoke on an outdoor patio instead? There are more than 500 places that restrict that, too. What’s a leisurely cigar smoker to do? We don’t have the technology to travel back in time, but we do have the next best thing: a vacation to Tampa, Florida, where the atavistic pleasures of cigar culture live on.

Finally, I was fortunate to take a trip to the Bushmills Distillery in Northern Ireland this fall, which I also wrote about for Inside Hook.