Environment, Law, and History: The Cigarette: A Political History

The murderous policies of Philip Morris - which dominated the U.S. cigarette market by enhancing tobacco smoke's nicotine content in the Marlboro brand - nearly escaped the tort law entirely.  Their lobbying led the American Law Institute's Reporter William Prosser to list "good tobacco" with good whiskey as gentlemen's fond vices.
The Tobacco Institute used the attorney client privilege to run their fraudulent research through their favorite law firm, a history of evasion of the product liability law that the Center for Tobacco Control & Research has documented.
Environment, Law, and History: The Cigarette: A Political History

Now comes The Cigarette: A Political History (Harvard UP, 2019) by Sarah Milov, co-founder of the Environment Law & History Blog.  It was recently reviewed by Reuel Schiller for Jotwell. Schiller writes that Milov's "narrative weaves together legal, political, and economic history in a manner that calls for a revaluation of the dimensions of twentieth-century liberalism and the nature of its decline. The book is a compelling exercise in historical synecdoche: its subject is the political history of the cigarette, but its story is that of the twentieth-century American state."
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Second, The Cigarette: A Political History furthers our understanding the demise of postwar liberalism at the end of the twentieth century.  While Milov does not suggest that American tobacco policy was progressive, she notes that the tactics deployed against it had a distinctly illiberal bent. By combining libertarian hostility towards the administrative state with an efficiency-based, cost-benefit attack on smoking, big tobacco’s opponents helped create a political culture that undermined egalitarian public policy. This market-based political culture denied the state a role in combatting systemic inequities within markets and ignored the fact that policies based on cost-benefit analysis frequently ignored important, not-easily-quantifiable values.

Don’t get me wrong. The fact that fewer Americans smoke now than at any time since the introduction of the cigarette is a triumph of postwar public policy.  But this victory did not come without a cost. Milov concludes The Cigarette: A Political History with the dismaying observation that while the “cultural cachet” of the cigarette has all but disappeared, smokers have not. Instead, concentrated within poor and minority communities, they have become increasingly stigmatized. Most Americans blame them for an addiction that is the legacy of a century of governmental action.