{"id":154,"date":"2020-03-21T21:39:14","date_gmt":"2020-03-21T21:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/?page_id=154"},"modified":"2020-03-21T21:39:14","modified_gmt":"2020-03-21T21:39:14","slug":"introduction-to-the-rediscovery-of-tobacco","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/introduction-to-the-rediscovery-of-tobacco\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to The Rediscovery of Tobacco"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The following excerpt is from the introduction to <\/em>The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of The Cigarette, published in 2019 by Jacob Grier. The book is available in print and digital formats from Amazon<\/a>, Apple<\/a>, and other retailers.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audite et alteram partem. [Listen even to the other side.]<\/em> <\/p> Inscription on the old city hall in Gouda, Netherlands<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In the late 1980s, the United States began extinguishing smoking on airplanes. \u201cSmoking or non?\u201d became a standard question at restaurants, then disappeared when outright bans took the smoking option off the table altogether. The reach of these prohibitions has extended ever since: to the bar, the restaurant patio, the college campus, the beach, the golf course, the park, the bus stop, the sidewalk, even to the home. More than at any time in modern history, today\u2019s nonsmokers can go about their lives without being subjected to smokers’ fumes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Few people, myself included, wish to turn the\nclock back entirely. Though I’m too young to remember smoking on airplanes, it\nstrikes me as guaranteed to make flying unpleasant. As both an employee and\npatron of bars and restaurants, I’m happy that most of them are now smoke-free.\nI\u2019m glad that the residents of my apartment building sign lease agreements\nforbidding indoor smoking, preventing the odor of cigarettes from permeating\nour living spaces. In hindsight, the extent to which smokers were once\npermitted to impose their preference onto everyone else appears astonishing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The banishment of smokers from social spaces\nhas, however, made it almost impossible to contemplate that tobacco deserves\nany tolerance. Smoking has become a low-status activity. Less than a fifth of\nAmericans currently smoke and the habit lingers mostly among those with less\neducation and lower incomes. Tobacco use is viewed as pure vice and the smoker\nas a helpless addict, deserving only pity or scorn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I write from experience on this, having been indoctrinated into holding strongly anti-tobacco views myself. As a child, I pestered smoking cousins to quit before the habit killed them. I bought completely into the view that tobacco is lethal and gross and made it all the way through college without taking so much as a single experimental puff from a cigarette \u2013 a rare feat in the philosophy department. My negative perspective on tobacco was unchallenged until I began working in the hospitality industry in one of the first high-quality coffee shops to open in Arlington, Virginia. One of my regulars there, a fitness instructor with an appreciation for well-made espresso and an intimidatingly broad knowledge of food and drink, was also, confusingly to my mind, an avid cigar smoker. On Sunday afternoons he would often step outside with his coffee to light one up. Why, I wondered, would someone who had such great taste and a career in physical fitness risk his palate and his health on those fat stogies? The contradiction perplexed me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until, one day, he invited me to try one. I was\nskeptical, but he talked about his cigars in much the same way that I talked\nabout my coffee. The varietal of the plant and origin of the leaf mattered,\nwith tobacco from Nicaragua tasting differently than tobacco from Brazil or\nCameroon. The shade of the cigar wrapper, from light claro to dark oscuro,\nmirrored the roasting spectrum of coffee beans. He spoke as if hand-rolled\ncigars made of pure leaf were as far removed from mass-market cigarettes as\nspecialty coffee is from a can of Folgers, suggesting that cigars could be\nevery bit as rewarding as the drink with which I was already enamored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was right. Although smoking my first cigar\nwas an unfamiliar experience, I took to it quickly. I remember starting out\nwith a light, approachable Romeo y Julieta and moving on to darker cigars like\nthe imposing Partagas Black. With my friend guiding me through the humidor at\nthe local tobacconist, his Sunday ritual soon became my own. For the next few\nyears we met every weekend to drink coffee, smoke cigars, and read books \u2014 out\non the patio in good weather, in the backroom of a nearby gastropub when it was\nraining or cold. The experience was enriching both for the cigar smoke itself\nand for the thoughtful conversations it reliably drew forth. Today I look back\non those Sunday afternoons as some of the happiest moments of my time in\nVirginia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who wish to eliminate smoking from the world\nfail to imagine tobacco as a craft product deserving of appreciation and as a\nwonderful complement to life\u2019s enjoyments. After decades of commodification,\nconsumers have discovered better wine, beer, coffee, cocktails, meat,\nchocolate, and produce. Specialty stores, farmers markets, diverse restaurants,\nand craft breweries have made this the most rewarding time ever to be a lover\nof food and drink in the United States. Yet it’s one of the worst times to be a\nsmoker. Tastemakers and lawmakers alike ignore the desires of smokers and their\nreasons for keeping up the practice. The proliferation of smoking bans makes it\nharder than ever to find a place to light up; tax hikes make it increasingly\nexpensive; adoption agencies and employers discriminate against smokers;\ngovernment regulations favor Big Tobacco over small producers and deadly\ncigarettes over safer alternatives. Though Philip Morris remains ever\nprofitable, the quality side of the tobacco market is threatened with\ndestruction by the Food and Drug Administration. To those of us who do take\npleasure in smoking, this presents a puzzle: How did attitudes toward tobacco\nget so completely backwards when so many other products are getting so much\nbetter?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time that I was discovering the pleasures\nof tobacco in Arlington, neighboring Washington, DC, was in the process of\npassing legislation to ban smoking in bars and restaurants. Though I worked\nprimarily in the service industry, I was also active in various libertarian\norganizations in the area. Many of my friends in that movement, regardless of\ntheir own smoking status, vehemently opposed the measure. A few of them formed\nBan the Ban, an organization whose members rallied the opposition with t-shirts\nand stickers bearing slogans like \u201cSmoking is Healthier than Fascism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sided with Ban the Ban for straightforward\nlibertarian reasons. I believed it was the right of private business owners,\nemployees, and customers to make their own choices about whether to allow\nsmoking. If patrons didn’t like it, they could take their business elsewhere.\nEven if secondhand smoke was as harmful as anti-smoking activists claimed \u2014 a\nquestion I hadn\u2019t yet explored \u2014 in a liberal society people should be free to\nmake their own bad decisions. That, for me, was enough to settle the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the Washington, D.C. city council, and many other lawmakers nationwide, that liberty-focused argument was not compelling. Bans spread all over the country, eventually even to tobacco-friendly Virginia where my friend and I enjoyed our Sunday afternoon cigars. As of this writing, forty-three states and more than 22,000 municipalities have enacted bans in hospitality spaces. To secure places for smokers to light up in peace, I realized, a defense of tobacco itself is needed, one that challenges the perception that smoking is pure vice. This set me on a course of researching and writing about tobacco for more than a decade, covering the topic for The Atlantic<\/em>, Slate<\/em>, Reason<\/em>, and other publications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found that the landscape of smoking research\nhad shifted considerably since the days when bold epidemiologists took on\ndeceitful tobacco companies to conclusively prove that cigarettes were causing\nan epidemic of lung cancer. When the companies settled lawsuits with state\ngovernments in 1998, they agreed to shut down industry-funded institutes that\nprovided pro-smoking talking points and to funnel tobacco money to anti-smoking\nresearchers and advocacy groups. While this was certainly a positive\ndevelopment in some respects, anti-smoking activists lost an incentive for\ndoing rigorous science when they de-fanged their long-time adversaries. They\nfound themselves free to say anything they wanted without fear of\ncontradiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And say anything they did. The more I researched\nthe epidemiology of secondhand smoke, the more I realized how often the claims\nof anti-smoking activists were wildly exaggerated. Given what we know about the\ndangers of firsthand smoke, it\u2019s sensible to suspect that secondhand smoke\nposes some danger, too. But determining exactly how dangerous it is, and at\nwhat levels of exposure, has proven to be difficult. Anti-smoking researchers\ntake advantage of this ambiguity to elide any doubts. They cherry-pick data,\nattack contrary evidence, and magnify tiny risks. Their actions reveal a\nwillingness to sacrifice quality science for the supposedly greater goods of\nstigmatizing smoking and imposing new restrictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One leading researcher, for example, claimed that a smoking ban in the small city of Helena, Montana, had slashed local heart attacks by nearly 60% in just six months. Though wildly implausible, this finding was reported uncritically everywhere from CBS to the New York Times<\/em> op\/ed page. Dubbed the \u201cHelena Miracle\u201d by critics, it has, like all miracles, proved immune to replication on a larger scale. Subsequent research has completely debunked the idea that simply banning smoking in bars and restaurants can achieve such remarkable results. Yet the assertion that bans drastically reduce heart attacks continues to justify increasingly restrictive prohibitions that push smokers ever further to the fringes of society, leaving them with progressively fewer places to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not content with demonizing secondhand smoke, researchers also turned their attention to \u201cthirdhand smoke,\u201d a term for the residue left behind on clothing and other surfaces when someone lights up nearby. For the past decade, thirdhand smoke has featured in countless news stories portraying smokers as objects of revulsion. \u201cSmokers themselves are also contaminated\u2026 smokers actually emit toxins,\u201d one researcher explained to Scientific American<\/em>. In the words of another, smokers are \u201cmobile tobacco contamination packages.\u201d Despite a lack of evidence that thirdhand smoke is a substantial health concern for actual living humans, the concept has been used to stigmatize not just smoking, but smokers themselves, rendering their mere existence in social spaces an unhygienic intrusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anti-smoking ideology now tragically extends to\nproducts that emit no smoke at all. A rapidly accumulating body of evidence\nsuggests that products such as electronic cigarettes are far less dangerous\nthan combustible tobacco and that they are helping smokers quit their\ndestructive habit. Instead of embracing these advances, however, anti-smoking\ngroups feed the public a fear-driven narrative that associates vaping with\ncancer, heart disease, seizures, popcorn lung, exploding devices, dangerous\nchemicals, and addiction to narcotics. The factual basis for these claims is\noften tenuous at best. The abstinence-only demands of traditional tobacco\ncontrol are having a corrosive effect on research into harm reduction,\nrepeating the excesses of the debate over smoking bans and often originating\nfrom the same biased sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalists routinely rely on experts to\ninterpret scientific results, but good journalists must also take the\nmotivations of their sources into account. Years of self-serving manipulation\nby Big Tobacco accustomed reporters to a simple dynamic: Anything the\npro-smoking side claimed was presumed to be a self-serving lie, while\nanti-smokers were on the side of truth and public health. The press has, with\nfew exceptions, failed to turn a skeptical eye on anti-smoking activism, which\ntoday is guided as much by ideology as it is by science. As a result,\njournalists, politicians, and the public hold beliefs about tobacco, secondhand\nsmoke, and electronic cigarettes that are contradicted by the best and most\nup-to-date scientific research, and restrictions go far beyond what can be\njustified by any reasonable interpretation of the evidence. Potentially\nlife-saving products are burdened by excessive bureaucracy, targeted with legal\nprohibitions, and subjected to moral panic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The aim of this book is to sort truth from\nideology and give tobacco its proper due, beginning with a look at Europeans’\nfirst encounters with the plant \u2014 a time when smoking was strange and unknown\noutside of the Americas, long before the twentieth century rise of Big Tobacco\nand the inescapable ubiquity of the cigarette. It ends with a look at the innovative\nproducts that are revolutionizing the market for nicotine once again. In\ncontrast to most contemporary writing on tobacco, this book looks beyond the\npublic health framing that views smoking as a purely medical problem and denies\nsmokers\u2019 agency and dignity. I take a longer and wider view, drawing on\ninsights from history, sociology, anthropology, epidemiology, economics, law,\nand political philosophy to provide a more fully developed perspective on\nsmoking and the anti-smoking movement. My approach values both health and\nliberty, and while acknowledging the real dangers of smoking, it\nunapologetically refuses to allow the former to run roughshod over the latter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An often-repeated anecdote expresses how novel\nthe habit of pipe smoking appeared when it first arrived in England. It usually\nfeatures Sir Walter Raleigh, though it is also attributed to Richard Tarlton,\nan actor and clown of the era. Which of the two hardly matters, for the story\nis almost certainly fictional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the tale, a servant or a couple of passersby see Raleigh or Tarlton exhaling smoke after taking a drag from a pipe. Having never witnessed someone smoking before, they leap to the obvious conclusion: The smoker must be on fire! To save his life they douse the flames with a glass of wine or ale. As the version in Tarltons Jests<\/em> has it, two men, \u201c’neuer seeing the like, wondreth at it: and seeing the vapour come out of Tarltons nose cryed out, Fire, fire, and threw a cup of Wine in Tarltons face.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story is an apt metaphor for our fraught\nrelationship with tobacco. Raleigh or Tarlton, enjoying pipe tobacco for its\npleasurable effects, could not have foreseen the tremendous toll in human lives\nthe crop would take centuries later when traditional pipes gave way to modern\ncigarettes. The naive passersby, splashing wine in the smoker’s face in the\nfalse belief that they were doing him a favor, were equally blind to the joys\ntobacco offers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today the dangers of tobacco are well known and the anti-smoking movement, oblivious to the leaf’s redeeming virtues, has acquired some very large tankards of wine with which to drown its use. But the proper path lies somewhere between ignorant pleasure and outright prohibition \u2014 a path this book will map in the pages to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * * <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To continue reading, purchase The Rediscovery of Tobacco <\/em>from Amazon<\/a>, Apple<\/a>, or your preferred book retailer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following excerpt is from the introduction to The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of The Cigarette, published in 2019 by Jacob Grier. The book is available in print and digital formats from Amazon, Apple, and other retailers. Audite et alteram partem. [Listen even to the other side.] Inscription on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-154","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","post-preview"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/154\/revisions\/165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobgrier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}