The Truth About Smoking

Review of
Please Don’t Poop in My Salad ... and Other Essays Opposing the War Against Smoking
by Joseph L. Bast, with a foreword by Joel Sherman
Chicago: The Heartland Institute, July 2006, 80 pages

Chicago, like all cities, has undergone a political correctness metamorphosis in the last 20 years that makes it look greatly different from poet Carl Sandburg’s Big Shoulders image.

Chicago is now quite sensitive, even to a little cigarette smoke. In Please Don’t Poop in My Salad ... and Other Essays Opposing the War Against Smoking, Joseph Bast, president of the Chicago-based free-market think tank The Heartland Institute, takes on these meddlers and shows why their allegedly well-intentioned interference should be resisted.

Although Chicago has outlawed all kinds of smoking in public and acts like an anxious, slightly overweight, suburbanite, fretting over cigarette smoke, Bast has the nerve to mock and impugn the High Church of the Holy Smoke Haters.

His heresy is our joy.

The essays are quick, zippy, and insightful. Bast takes on the anti-smoking crowd and anti-smoking politics and science from a lot of different angles: science, common sense, anger, frustration, irony, humor, outrage, and pity. He recognizes that smokers choose to smoke and know that even John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart couldn’t duck the cancer bullet after smoking 2 and 3 packs a day for years.

However, as Bast points out, we take plenty of risks every day—driving fast, laughing too loudly, drinking too much, dancing, participating in sports, camping or climbing in the wilderness, and walking on slippery bathroom floors at home. Bast points out that a good many fears arise nowadays because we are so safe and comfortable that we are left to worry about phantom risks—and we have too many fat and happy academics, lawyers, and advocacy groups who make a good living off our anxieties and worries.

As a result of the phantom fears these people generate, too many politicians get elected by promising to do something, and they create too many agencies where people need to do something to keep themselves afloat.

The anti-smoking brigade’s new catechism says smokers are killing their kids with secondhand smoke—and everyone else, for that matter. This sounds ominous and convincing until you check out the research. Bast exposes this claim as the worst kind of junk science.

He points out, for example, that secondhand smoke in the very worst of circumstances is the equivalent of one cigarette a day. There is no research anywhere that shows such a small exposure affects anyone’s health.

Bast makes it clear that the anti-smoking campaign is not actually a matter of public health but instead a battle over aesthetics. Anti-smoking zealots oppose people smoking in public not because their health is threatened—it most certainly is not—but because they don’t like the smell.

Any individuals who may be carrying a few extra pounds should be very concerned by the anti-smoking crusade, as weight problems seem to be setting off another of these aesthetically oriented crusades. Bast wisely points out the merits of the old-fashioned version of society, in which people only interfere with others when necessary, and aren’t allowed to cook up excuses for being boss.

Interestingly, a study of British physicians who smoked less than ten cigarettes a day showed they lived longer than nonsmokers. Cigarette smoke in moderation appears to be good for preventing dementia, colitis, and family quarrels, and it steadies the nerves.

Aristotle said it best: All things in moderation. Bast shows us that this is true in politics and public health as well.

John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. lives in Lake Brownwood, Texas.