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Nicotine and GravyA new book on why Americans love cigarettes—and whether the government should interfere.

By Richard KleinPosted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 7:18 AM ET

The Cigarette Century. In The Cigarette Century, Allan M. Brandt has written a meticulously researched and passionately argued history of smoking in America. A professor of medical history at Harvard, he makes the strongest possible case for repressive international controls to "reduce the harms of smoking" in the interest of public health. According to Brandt, if tobacco consumption continues at its current rate, there could be 1 billion deaths from tobacco-related disease in this century—10 times the number of tobacco-related deaths in the 20^th. In his view, this is a public-health catastrophe that dwarfs the dangers of infectious disease.

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Brandt's alarm is made all the more persuasive by his impressive command of the vast tobacco archive; millions of pages of tobacco litigation are now available online, and tobacco literature makes up the largest collection at the New York Public Library. His competence extends to the medical science of epidemiology, whose development in the 20^th century provided statistics for diseases such as lung cancer, and the modern advertising industry, with its sophisticated innovations in consumer psychology: For example, Joe Camel's power over children's imaginations has been said to be greater than that of Mickey Mouse. Possessed of this scholarly authority, Brandt is able to argue with great force and clarity against a powerfully American libertarian instinct that seeks to make cigarette smoking a matter of individual choice and personal responsibility. If he fails to persuade, it is because he barely acknowledges the pleasure and benefits of cigarettes, despite the risks.

Doctors have known for centuries that smoking is bad for your health (except when, as always fashionable, some thought it was the panacea). However, it was only with the surgeon general's report in 1964 that cigarette smoking was proven to be a cause of cancer and subsequently stigmatized by medical and insurance institutions allied with government. To many, it is a mystery that 20 percent of adults in America continue to smoke despite decades of warnings. (The percentage might be larger if it included all the people who "don't smoke" but bum cigarettes.) Smokers put their longevity and their health at risk, at great expense and inconvenience to themselves. But tobacco has its benign advantages and seductive charms: It kills boredom, promotes sociability, controls anxiety, offers consolation, and, when elegantly done, as in movies or advertisements, it can be seen to be an activity of Promethean beauty, an elegant juggling of fire, ash, and smoke.

In the United States in particular, tobaccco has long been identified with freedom, first by the early Virginia settlers and more recently, brilliantly, by the Marlboro man; the cowboy smoker incarnates the American dream of escaping, if only for the time of a cigarette, from the incessant demands of tedious work and domestic reality. In the 19^th century, the "freedom to smoke" was loudly demanded by bourgeois liberal culture, essentially by men, who argued for the right to have spaces to smoke free of women's moralizing intrusion. In the 20^th century, as America made a shift from class-based to mass consumption, women drew the connection between the right to vote and the right to smoke publicly, which they won simultaneously. For hundreds of years, until recently, tobacco was a sort of totem substance in this country, like cheese in France or pasta in Italy: "Tobacco," it was proudly proclaimed, "is American!"

But today we know that smoking significantly increases the risk of dying early—by 23 years on average, according to some estimates. And so, against the libertarian claim that we have an inalienable freedom to smoke, Brandt invokes both the cataclysmic dangers to public health that smoking represents and the criminal conduct of the cigarette industry—namely, its habit of lying on behalf of cigarettes over the last 80 years. He describes in rich detail the progressive discovery of the precise effects of smoking and the fierce resistance by the tobacco companies to the public disclosure of these effects. Brandt avers:

Tobacco use is aggressively promoted and marketed; a vast majority of smokers throughout the world begin as children; smokers become addicted to nicotine, a powerful drug; this addiction is reinforced by marketing, promotion, and powerful cultural symbols, and non-smokers (again, especially children) are harmed by the tobacco smoke of adults (who become addicted as children).