Complete Stretching: A New Exercise Program for Health and Vitality
Author: Maxine Tobias
30-minute stretch workouts for exercise through movement, breathing, and relaxation. A dramatic new entry into a crowded field; with full-color illustrations on every page!
Interesting textbook: Drugs for Less or Chen Chiu The Original Acupuncture
For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health
Author: Jacob Sullum
The tobacco controversy is usually portrayed as a battle between selfless defenders of public health and greedy merchants of death. In For Your Own Good, journalist Jacob Sullum argues that such a view conceals the true nature of the crusade for a smoke-free society. As Sullum demonstrates, this struggle is not about the behavior of corporations; it's about the behavior of individuals. It is an attempt by one group of people to impose their tastes and preferences on another. For Your Own Good shows that long before Philip Morris or R. J. Reynolds existed, tobacco's opponents condemned smoking as disgusting, immoral, addictive, unhealthy, and inconsiderate. In recent decades, they have used scientific evidence that smoking is hazardous to enlist the state in their crusade, arguing that the government has an obligation to discourage behavior that might lead to disease or injury. Given this country's tradition of limited government, however, Americans tend to be skeptical of this argument. Sullum justifies their misgivings, noting that achieving a 'smoke-free society' in a nation where tens of millions choose to smoke is necessarily an exercise in tyranny.
Peter Kurth
Before you read any further, folks, I'd advise you to lock your doors. Close the windows and draw the blinds. You're about to hear something you're not supposed to know.
"There is no evidence," writes Jacob Sullum in For Your Own Good, his trenchant analysis of the anti-smoking movement in America, "that casual exposure to second-hand smoke has any impact on your life expectancy." People who live for years with heavy smokers, it's true, run a slightly higher risk of developing lung cancer than people who don't, raising the "lifetime risk," Sullum tells us, "from about 0.34 percent to about 0.41 percent." Neither is there any convincing data to support the claim that smoking imposes a disproportionate financial burden on society, or that advertising, even when aimed at kids, "plays an important role in getting people to smoke, as opposed to getting them to smoke a particular brand."
"Because smokers tend to die earlier than nonsmokers," Sullum remarks crisply, "the costs of treating tobacco-related illness are balanced, and probably outweighed, by savings on Social Security, nursing home stays, and medical care in old age." Sullum, a senior editor at the libertarian Reason magazine and himself a nonsmoker, is dead set against a federal ban on cigarettes and other tobacco products. He's also against their further regulation, not because he thinks smoking is a good idea, but because he thinks that, under the specious guise of science, a moral crusade of 19th century dimensions is operating on the eve of the 21st. He is particularly irritated by what he calls "the Public Health establishment," which, having vanquished most natural epidemics in our time, now treats smoking and other "addictive behaviors" as if they were communicable diseases.
"Behavior cannot be transmitted to other people against their will," Sullum observes. "People do not choose to be sick, but they do choose to engage in risky behavior. The choice implies that the behavior, unlike a viral or bacterial infection, has value. It also implies that attempts to control the behavior will be resisted," especially among the young. Elementary child psychology, not to mention your grandmother's home wisdom, will confirm that the fastest way to get a child to do something is to tell him not to do it. We're all being treated like children anyway, Sullum thinks, when the federal government redefines cigarettes as "nicotine delivery devices" and ignores the truth that every smoker knows -- that smoking is pleasurable, sensual and utilitarian, "relieving boredom," as Sullum says, "soothing distress, aiding concentration [and] warding off loneliness." In other words, smokers are not mere "addicts" in search of a fix, still less the helpless victims of the tobacco companies. Nobody smokes without some benefit to themselves.
Sullum is not a polemicist, and he is not encouraging anyone who reads his book to rush out for a pack of Camels. He wants Americans to make health decisions on their own and for themselves, and he wants an end to smoking hysteria, which, as he vividly demonstrates, has come and gone at different times in history without any lasting result. In the meantime, don't be fooled by the federal government's high moral tone in its fight against Big Tobacco: No government on earth is going to forgo nearly $20 billion a year in tax revenue, no matter who the villains are. -- Salon
New England Journal of Medicine
A curious and challenging mixture of fact and philosophy is what makes this book so intriguing and worthwhile. Sullum marshals an impressive array of facts and arguments in tackling such fundamental issues as addiction, the risks of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, the legitimacy of taxing cigarettes, and the effects of advertising. He has undertaken a truly prodigious amount of research and frequently (but decidedly not always) demonstrates a striking sophistication in discussing technical issues. The history he presents is consistently accurate, and his enumeration of arguments for and against various propositions often exhibits a scholarliness not always found in the work of tobacco-control researchers.
Wall Street Journal - Richard Klein
Compelling. . .you can't help being chilled by the implications of this newly triumphant public health philosophy.
New York Times - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Finely reasoned. . .meticulously logical. . .fair and balanced.
Washington Post - Joshua Shenk
For Your Own Good is a must-read.
Richard Klein
Compelling. . .you can't help being chilled by the implications of this newly triumphant public health philosophy. -- The Wall Street Journal
Joshua Shenk
For Your Own Good is a must-read. -- The Washington Post
Kirkus Reviews
A somewhat predictable libertarian attack on antismoking efforts. Gadflies can perform an important service when public debate is one-sided. In this volume Sullum, a veteran journalist and senior editor of Reason magazine, assumes this mantle and boldly leaps into the ongoing tobacco wars, but is only partially successful. On one hand, he presents a thorough overview of the history of tobacco use and efforts to restrict it, is straightforward about the dangers, and makes a serious effort to shift the grounds of debate from public health to political freedom. On the other hand, he's too willing to focus attention on his opponents rather than on the issue, replicating the ad hominem and straw-man attacks for which he criticizes the antismoking movement. Sullum's argument is that efforts to eliminate smoking are tyrannical and run roughshod over the traditional distinction between other- and self-regarding actions that classical liberals use to distinguish between behavior that should and should not be subject to public control. This is a legitimate concern that has been shoved aside too easily, and his charge of collectivism should not be dismissed as quaint and archaic. However, after clearing the smoke away from the fundamental issue of political values, he asserts his libertarian position rather than arguing for it. Without recognizing that some individual behavior is appropriately restricted, identifying the criteria that distinguish that behavior, and assessing where smoking falls in relation to those criteria, Sullum is just circling the issue his book needs to address. If, as Sullum sarcastically concludes, 'freedom is the most pernicious' risk factor for disease and injuryin the eyes of antismokers, a more disciplined analysis of smoking in relation to freedom is badly needed.
Table of Contents:
| Author's note | ||
| Introduction: Without a Doubt | 1 | |
| 1 | From Devil's Weed to Soldier's Friend | 15 |
| 2 | Appropriate Remedial Action | 40 |
| 3 | Coughing Cowboys | 82 |
| 4 | Vice Charge | 119 |
| 5 | Smoke Alarm | 138 |
| 6 | Try, Try Again | 181 |
| 7 | Little White Slavers | 220 |
| 8 | Doctor's Orders | 256 |
| Appendix | Ten Myths of the Anti-Smoking Movement | 277 |
| Notes | 281 | |
| Bibliography | 321 | |
| Acknowledgments | 328 | |
| Index | 329 |
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