My new book: The New Prohibition
In 2019, when I published The Rediscovery of Tobacco, I thought I wouldn’t have much more to say on the subject. I was mistaken. As it turns out, the next few years would provide many new reasons to write about smoking and vaping, as well as an acceleration of policies that amount to full prohibition of broad classes of products. That’s why today I’m publishing my latest book, The New Prohibition: The Dangerous Politics of Tobacco Control.
From the description:
WARNING: Prohibition kills. Government prohibition of nicotine and tobacco products is hazardous to public health. Prohibitions are often poorly targeted, encouraging smoking by banning safer alternatives and protecting deadly cigarettes from competition. Prohibition creates illicit markets that lead to unregulated and untaxed products, raids and arrests by law enforcement officers, and incarceration of sellers.
We are poised at the edge of a new era of nicotine and tobacco prohibition, one that has failed to learn from past policy failures involving drugs and alcohol. This collection of essays explores how illiberal policies, from unjustifiably extensive smoking bans to laws forbidding the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, lead to dangerous unintended consequences. Fortunately, the aim of saving lives lost to smoking is compatible with a more humane approach to nicotine and tobacco use. The New Prohibition charts a smarter way forward that encourages harm reduction and respects the rights of consenting adults.
Along with a new introduction, the book collects nine of my previously published essays and articles from Reason, Slate, Arc Digital, Liberal Currents, and Exponents. This includes some of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written, thematically linked by advocacy for harm reduction, respect for the liberties of adults who smoke or vape, and avoidance of the pitfalls of prohibition.
Why this book and why now? I’ll be honest, if you’ve followed my work for the past few years, you probably don’t need this book. You may have already read most of it. Maybe you’d enjoy having these essays collected in one place, maybe you like the way it looks on a shelf, or maybe you just want to support my work. If that’s the case, thank you! I really appreciate it. But you’re not the primary audience I wrote this for.
My motivation for publishing The New Prohibition is to change the conversation around some rapidly advancing policies that will have pernicious consequences. When I wrote my previous tobacco book, widely used products remained broadly legal. A lot has changed since 2019. To cite a few examples:
Five states and hundreds of local jurisdictions have passed bans on flavored e-cigarettes and, in some cases, on menthol cigarettes as well.
The Food and Drug Administration has made it so that nearly all e-cigarettes are unlawfully sold while awaiting authorization, which thus far amounts to a de facto federal flavor ban.
The FDA has proposed a federal menthol and flavored cigar ban and will soon propose a rule requiring cigarettes (and perhaps pipe tobacco and cigars) to be stripped of nearly all nicotine.
New Zealand has passed a law making it illegal to sell combustible tobacco to anyone born after the year 2008 for their entire lives. A similar law banning even non-combustible tobacco and nicotine has been proposed in California.
Arrests and prosecutions of sellers of forbidden products are becoming more common in places that have implemented bans, from Thailand to Massachusetts. With the addition of charges related to tax evasion, selling menthol cigarettes or flavored e-cigs can become a felony crime punishable by years in prison.
A recent survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control finds that more than half of American adults support prohibiting the sale of all tobacco products.
Professionals in the field of tobacco control tend to support some or all of these policies. If they’re of the Bloomberg variety, the more bans the better. If they lean toward harm reduction, they’re more likely to support some bans (on combusted products) and oppose others (on e-cigarettes and oral tobacco). Both groups view these policies less as bans than as benign regulations, dismissing the risks of illicit markets, arrests of sellers, and other unintended consequences.
If you’ve read my recent work, you know that these risks are deserving of more attention. Thirty-four million adults in the United States smoke. Globally about a billion people use tobacco, one out of every eight people on Earth. Throughout history, prohibitions on tobacco have failed again and again. We should be skeptical that they will work better now. What has changed is the development of much safer ways of consuming nicotine, which we should encourage through liberal policies. Governments instead often do the reverse, banning the safest alternatives while perpetuating smoking. Whatever one’s vision of ideal policy, prohibition as actually practiced is clearly falling short.
Hence the blunt title of the book, The New Prohibition. We are entering an era not of mere regulation or consumer protection, but of prohibition. If we are going to attempt to ban one of the most popular and easily accessible drugs in human history, we should do so with eyes open. I hope that my new book will go some way toward changing the way we talk about these policies, especially among liberals and progressives who seem to forget everything they know about drug policy when the drug in question is nicotine.
How to buy it: The New Prohibition is available now on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle formats. (I earn about the same royalty regardless of which edition you buy, but if you want a print version I do recommend the hardcover. Its feel and cover quality are superior to the paperback.) If you’re intrigued by the topic or have enjoyed my writing over the years, I’d of course greatly appreciate you picking up a copy for yourself or a friend and helping spread the word.
Cover credit: Big thanks to my friend Andrew Bohrer for the striking cover design. Andrew also illustrated the cover for The Rediscovery of Tobacco. Check out his blog and other work here.
Liquidity Preference will return to its normal format soon. Thank you for reading!