Month: September 2019

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.

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.