For Your Own Good: The Anti Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health

by Jacob Sullum

Book Overview

From Simon & Schuster, For Your Own Good is Jacob Sullum exploration of the anti-smoking crusade and the tyranny of public health. The tobacco controversy is usually portrayed as a battle between... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684827360
• ISBN13: 9780684827360
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A Logical Indictment of the "All or None" Political Approach

Jacob Sullum's book, "For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health" is maybe the best book for anyone interested in the issue of smoking. Sullum, a non-smoker, has taken a logical, meticulously researched look at the smoking issue and come to the heart of the essential problem; the "all or none" approach of the anti-tobacco movement. Rather than approaching his book as a confirmation for smokers who wish to smoke, Sullum examines all of the essential issues of tobacco use including the health effects of secondhand smoke, the danger of smoking itself, and the comparable danger of both activities in relation to other activities. Sullum gives the specifics of these issues and points out the problems with the broad-brush generalities that anti-smoking crusaders have given to the public. For example, one has a difficult time reconciling statements like "Smoking takes ten years off your life" against "Quitting smoking for ten years will return your lungs to a healthy state". Sullum addresses discrepancies like this and brings the issues into perspective. Sullum takes a cool and reasoned approach to this book and editorializes only at points that demand it. Sullum wants the reader to know they've come to the right place if they want 'just the facts' and the inevitable logical conclusions that can be drawn from them. In purpose, "For Your Own Good" doesn't vilify the anti-smoking movement, despite its title. Sullum points out early in the book that he found the vast majority of anti-smoking proponents he interviewed to be reaonable and well-worth talking too. It also doesn't give smokers a free-pass to smoke eighty cigarettes a day without any fear of ill health effects. The tobacco industry takes its lumps where warranted, but is equally defended against the wholesale extortion it has been exposed to. The tobacco industry may have spent billions to get millions to smoke, but it is also now forced to pay billions for a campaign of self-incrimination, and even pays out billions for public programs that benefit non-smokers by an overwhelming majority. In the end, Sullum's reasoned approach makes for a most effective indictment of the anti-smoking crusade. The anti-smoking movement is "all or none" and wants you to hate smoking and oppress those who choose to smoke as a means to ending smoking forever. The political implications do not matter. If a "smoke free society" means the total loss of freedom for those who smoke and the eventual loss of freedom for all, we're going to live our lives as others tell us to, like it or not. The spread of misinformation isn't important as long as it achieves the ultimate goal. Think of the most zealous of religious groups being given tens of billions of dollars and complete government support for their view. Any individual not expressing total devotion to any of the religious tenets is an apostate to be condemened in public. This view will be expressed on every radio and television

An Important Book

The author of this book doesn't smoke but I do and I thank him. I have lived in both Great Britain and the USA, and am finding anti-smoking activism an increasing bore in both areas, although much more so in 'the land of the free.' Sullum points out that much anti-smoking policy is based on 'second-hand-smoke' fears and that these fears are demonstrably hysterical. The fear of getting lung cancer from sharing a bar with smokers is like fearing cirrhosis from smelling a drunkard's breath. But now US policy makers wish to ban smoking everywhere, private clubs, outdoors...they'll be imprisoning people for enjoying a cigarette soon if they have their way. As if individuals and people like restaurant owners couldn't decide without the government's boot on their necks where they wish to allow smoking and where they don't. I've smoked for four decades, and can't think when anyone's smoking ever bothered me, or when I was ever asked to put out my cigarette, until the last few years, once the alarmists started holding sway. Britain did not always treat well those subject to its empirical power. America had its witch trials, its commie hunts, its slavery. Germany's citizens went along with the vilification, degradation, and attempted murder of all its Jews. It's human nature, apparently, for societies to vilify and harass, such persons and practices as they choose, when they choose, without good reason: as reasons are lacking, societies simply make them up, and most docile citizens just go along with the hate-streams provided. Sullum points out that tobacco, and cigarettes particularly, have been banned before, for reasons that proved hysterical or alarmist, and that tolerance of smoking returns in time. Smoking is an exquisite pleasure. Enjoyment of it should be moderated, or even avoided by individuals, as they choose. Such moderate views are rarely heard in these days of anti-smoking Taliban. Sullum is fair-minded and objective. He's written a wonderful book, of import to smokers, and to all who despise ignorance, intolerance, alarmism, hysteria, and the hate-filled members of our societies, who are now using these age-old weapons, to humiliate and ostracize tobacco users. Read this book. Smoke pridefully, and resist the temptation to blow your smoke, in the face of the Taliban types. Unlike them, most smokers are civilized, and this is the source of our pride.

Clear, lucid, fair, and meticulously logical.

Jacob Sullum has written what can only be described as a breath of fresh air in a current of noxious fumes. This book is a fair and balanced account of the anti-smoking movement and has received favorable reviews in such prestigious medical journals as the "Lancet," and the "New England Journal of Medicine."The critiques of the propaganda used by the public heath movement to scare people: the assertion that advertising causes smoking, for example, are particularly interesting. The demolishment of the assertion that the hazards of smoking were recently discovered (actually, James I published one of the first anti-tobacco pamphlets in 1604) should make anyone considering suing the tobacco industry to recover damages take pause.This is one book you will not be able to put down. Everything is documented, so checking Sullum's sources is easy. Regardless of your position on smoking, this book's clear detail about tobacco and its enemies will make for enlightening reading. I must respond to what I think are genuine attempts to commit ad hominem attacks. One reviewer simply noted, without reading the book (it was obvious), that because Sullum in an editor of Reason magazine, his book and everything he says should (essentially) be ignored. Reason magazine is published by the Reason Foundation, which has accepted donations from tobacco companies in the past. Ergo, using the logical fallacy of ad hominem, one should ignore everything Mr. Sullum writes. This kind of reasoning is the last haven of the ignorant. In the Introduction, Sullum notes that less than 1% of the Reason Foundation's budget has ever been funded by the tobacco industry, and that Philip Morris has bought ad space in Reason Magazine. Yet he also points out that his job is not dependent on Philip Morris, and that Reason has never (and does not) assert control over his writing. Sullum was a critic of the anti-smoking movement long before working at Reason and this book also criticizes the tobacco industry. Hardly the work of someone who is a flack for Philip Morris. And finally, imagine what the reviewer said is true. Namely, that money makes results. At once the entire foundation of modern science is destroyed. The anti-smoking movement gets funded too, by groups that have a financial stake in getting less people to smoke (like the Federal government, for example). Ergo, anything the anti-smoking movement says is biased because it is in their own self-interest. We must accept this if we committ the ad hominem fallacy. If we are not stupid morons, we should look at the evidence. If Jacob Sullum is a tobacco pawn, then his book wouldn't stand up to critical review. Yet it does, as evidenced by the reviews in leading medical journals that are favorable.Something I want to point out that Sullum did not have access to when he wrote "For Your Own Good:" The EPA's classification of secondhand smoke as a class A carcinogen was declared void by a federal judge in 1998 due to gross scientific errors,

Carefully documented work of critical journalism

Sullum's book offers fascinating insights into the history of smoking, the long-held concerns about its health effects, and the persecutions and prohibitions to which smokers have been subjected...."[It] is safe," writes Sullum, "to say that the hazards of secondhand smoke have been grossly exaggerated" (p. 159). As the evidence reviewed by Sullum himself suggests (see chapter 5), this conclusion may well be an understatement. The health hazards of secondhand smoke may be the hoax of the twentieth century. The strand of junk science underlying this hoax owes much to the 1992 EPA report that classified secondhand tobacco smoke as a "Group A carcinogen." It may be useful to quote a source that was not available to Sullum at the time of his writing, namely, the recent judgment of U.S. District Judge William Osteen: "The court is faced with the ugly possibility that EPA adopted a methodology for each chapter, without explanation, based on the outcome sought in that chapter.... The record and EPA's explanations to the court make it clear that using standard methodology, EPA could not produce statistically significant results with its selected studies" (Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative v. EPA, No. 6:93CV00370 at 60, 77, M.D.N.C., July 17, 1998).The claim of Sullum's subtitle, "the tyranny of public health," is not without substance. The book explains how the public health movement has drifted from public-good types of concerns, such as sanitation or contagious diseases, toward a frontal attack on individual choices and politically incorrect lifestyles (see especially chapters 2 and 8).... Sullum's book in interesting in many other respects, including its historical review of litigation against the tobacco industry (see especially chapter 6), a long series of attempts to negate the responsibility of individuals for their own consumption choices.All in all, "For Your Own Good" provides a lively and informative treatment of glaring political distortions of science in the service of a shameful witch-hunt waged by public health totalitarians.

A Well Documented Expose'

The book thoroughly exposes the serious threat to liberty posed by the public health movement, a grim mob of meddlers who intend to force everyone to stop smoking, lose weight, eat veggies, etc., etc., etc. With meticulous reporting, the book focusses on anti smoking delirium and the outrageous lengths to which the public health crowd will go to impose its no-smoking will on the rest of the populace, but the underlying message is that these people are ready and willing to repeat the same tactics against other violations of their prescribed lifestyle code. As Mr. Sullum explains, the public health service was originally organized for the purpose of preventing and controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases -- a mission that is hard to argue with. But when these diseases no longer posed a major threat, the various arms of the public health movement (government bureaucracies and the non-profit groups, like the American Cancer Society) decided to turn their attention to lifestyle factors -- with smoking as enemy number one. As copiously documented by Sullum, this put them on a collision course with liberty, because these folks are not content with dispensing accurate information for individuals to use in making their own decisions about how to treat their bodies. To their dismay, they realized that a large number of people are not particularly inclined to follow their advice. So the public health boys, it turns out, are more than willing to corrupt science in order to make their information more scary and to push through laws that coerce people into doing what they tell them to. The latest ploy -- and perhaps the most egregious -- is their aggressive promotion of the totally unproven idea that second hand smoke can seriously threaten the health of innocent bystanders. (I have personally researched this topic and there is no there there.) This excellent, eye-opening book should be read by everyone, because in their crusade for maximum potential longevity, the public health movement is making a major attack on the cherished freedoms of us all -- and ruining the credibility of science to boot. I think, however, that one of the book's strengths is also a weakness. Sullum's style is totally objective, low key and understated. This gives it a dispassionate credibility. But it also makes it a little dry, and since the antics of the public health machine are so beyond the pale, I wish he would have yelled and cursed and thrown things at the wall a little. But that's OK, readers can do that on their own.