Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking by Christopher Snowdon

Author:Christopher Snowdon [Snowdon, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History
Publisher: Little Dice
Published: 2012-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

“It’s the only issue I know of where there aren’t two sides—two intelligent sides. I have a comic-book mentality—I grew up with comic books—and I see this as good versus evil.”14

The debate over what to do about tobacco was therefore only open to those with fierce anti-smoking views whose opinions differed by the smallest of degrees. The belief in an all-powerful tobacco industry helped the anti-smoking lobby to see themselves as underdog heroes fighting a six-headed beast and, because they were so obviously in the right, any dissenters must be recipients of tobacco money.

Since those who disagreed with their increasingly illiberal agenda numbered in the millions, a grand conspiracy was required. A form of paranoid McCarthyism emerged, dragging in not just cigarette companies and tobacco farmers but legions of politicians, social commentators, restaurant owners, bar owners, hoteliers, journalists, civil rights groups and anyone who had ever worked for the tobacco industry or its suppliers, especially if they happened to be smokers themselves.

Seeing the influence of the industry behind any dissenting voice was nothing new in the history of anti-smoking. During the 1857 Lancet controversy, those who wrote to the journal to defend smoking were frequently accused of being in the pay of tobacco companies. Smokers were expected to resist anti-smoking measures because they were addicts and the tobacco industry was expected to resist for obvious financial reasons; the views of both could therefore be dismissed out of hand. It was those who neither smoked nor worked for tobacco companies, but still spoke out in favour of smokers’ rights, who were the baffling anomalies and the anti-smokers went to great lengths to impugn their motives, painstakingly searching for their names in the millions of pages of tobacco industry documents now available online.

These names included British writers like Sean Gabb, Tim Luckhurst and Chris Tame. The latter was the founder of the civil rights group, the Libertarian Alliance and had never been a smoker, did not care for smoking and would not allow smoking in his home but was nonetheless director of the smokers’ rights group the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (FOREST).

In the US, the journalist Jacob Sullum was an eloquent critic of the excesses of the anti-smoking movement and, in 1994, drew attention to the inadequacies of the EPA report on secondhand smoke in an article for The Wall Street Journal. Sullum had never received a cent from the tobacco industry but when RJ Reynolds reprinted the article in a newspaper advertisement under the apt heading ‘If we said it, you might not believe it,’ Sullum was given $5,000 in reprint fees and the anti-smokers were given a stick with which to beat him. Appearing in a television debate with John Banzhaf, the ASH founder attempted to undermine Sullum by announcing: “We also want to tell the folks out there that you’re in the pay of the tobacco industry.”15

When Stanton Glantz and John Slade put together a compendium of the juiciest excerpts from the Brown &

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