ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 4 (April 2002) pp. 185-188.
REGULATING TOBACCO by Robert L. Rabin and Stephen D. Sugarman (Editors). New York: Oxford University Press,
2001. 299 pp. Cloth $49.95. ISBN: 0-19-513907-0. Paper $19.95. ISBN: 0-19-514756-1.
Reviewed by William Haltom, Department of Politics and Government, University of Puget Sound.
In 1993 Oxford Press published SMOKING POLICY: LAW, POLITICS, AND CULTURE, a volume edited by law professors Robert
L. Rabin and Stephen D.
Sugarman that considered policies for dealing with tobacco from a variety of legal, political, and sociological
angles. That volume had the advantages and disadvantages of appearing at an inflection point in regulation of
tobacco in the United States. Editors Rabin and Sugarman have produced a succeeding volume blessed with the currency
and shrewdness of the previous collection and issued at a more propitious moment perhaps. Even if tobacco regulation
should again lurch off in directions that I cannot foresee, REGULATING TOBACCO will adorn undergraduate as well
as graduate courses regarding policy and law. This compendium of legal, medical, and political inquiry regarding
tobacco is the single best classroom tool on the subject that I know.
Contributors include academics who specialize in law, public health, economics, medicine, or political science,
which makes this collection catholic. Essays concern the regulation of tobacco by means of international and domestic
politics, taxes, marketing, and litigation, as well as efforts to reduce injuries to smokers and availability to
youths, which makes the coverage copious. Every essay complements the whole. Each chapter features heuristics
and history to synopsize the etiology and performance of policies to date. Chapters other than the eight-page
introduction average 35 pages, so instructors might reasonably demand that students read a chapter per night.
The index will expedite use of the book as for building bibliographies, as will the abundant references and footnotes.
The writing is almost always clear, but arguments and analyses will challenge newcomers and provoke old hands.
Subscribers to THE LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW might be presumed to be most interested in chapters on the politics
of regulation and regulation via
litigation, but other chapters abound in information and insights that will deepen learning and challenge suppositions.
For example, economists Frank J. Chaloupka and Christina Czart and health researcher Melanie Wakefield survey
designs for and consequences of taxation of tobacco in perhaps too much detail but in language clear even to those
unschooled in economics. Their syntheses will inform every undergraduate whom the intricacies of taxation do not
daunt. They cite econometric evidence for the addictiveness of tobacco products. They show that increasing costs
of consumption does reduce consumption and even note evidence that tobacco taxes may not be as regressive as some
have claimed. In addition, the authors' historical information will remind
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students and instructors alike of the income that the regulated have supplied to regulators through national and
state taxes. Amid lawsuits for recovery of the costs of dealing with health problems of tobacco's users and contention
over campaign contributions and subsidies, students should be encouraged to follow all the money.
Chapters from public health professionals inform and provoke both because of and in spite of their tendency to
adopt anti-tobacco perspectives. Two such professionals appraise the effectiveness of existing efforts cogently,
perhaps because they may presume policy goals as consensual. Kenneth E. Warner may take for granted that reducing
the harm of tobacco is good, just as Dr. Nancy A. Rigotti may suppose that keeping tobacco from the young is a
good thing. Since even tobacco companies do not oppose such goals as goals (whatever they may do about them in
practice), the authors' ardor does them credit and their virtuosity makes them convincing. Students and instructors
alike will profit from these experts' nuanced appraisals of policies.
Two other students of public health, Peter D. Jacobson and Lisa M. Zapawa, explore environmental tobacco smoke
and clean air policies. Their chapter includes a candid stance in favor of clean indoor air, an unrelenting focus
on the practical performance and potential of laws and policies, and an instantly understandable chart of what
states had done about clean air through 2000.
Of course, expertise born of or issuing from zeal may also skew exposition and information. At times the skew
may seem harmless, as when authors attribute 400,000 deaths per year in the United States to tobacco without acknowledging
that the statistic has been contested, as noted by one of the editors in his own chapter (p. 249). Even half that
figure would yield every week more deaths than are directly attributed to the attacks on September 11, 2001, so
more restrained estimates would serve about as well. More skepticism about such estimates might impart more authority
to extrapolations of a "global tobacco epidemic" (p. 245), too.
In other instances, skew may necessitate intervention by the instructor lest an essay obscure as well as reveal.
John Slade's survey of a half-century of the marketing of tobacco exudes the viewpoint of a medical doctor eager
to advance public health. Dr. Slade's unabashed deconstruction of tobacco advertising and promotions shows how
facts contradict marketing, which makes tobacco, Dr. Slade says, a "peculiar industry" (p. 101). Denying
or diminishing incontrovertible truths is hardly peculiar to the marketing of cigarettes. Worse, when the author
describes marketers' emphasis on the rights of smokers and freedom of choice to be peculiar usage (p. 73), his
zeal blinds him to cultural facts. Americans polled on the topic consistently agree that a nicotine habit is very
hard to break, but about three out of four respondents agree that the habit is up to the individual to take up
or to put down. A usage preferred by about three-quarters of those who speak a language does not seem peculiar
as a matter of lexicography. As a matter of marketing, to forsake the "rights talk" or individual choice
perspectives embraced by the vast majority of one's audience would be saintly self-sacrifice and commercial self-destruction.
The phrase "peculiar industry" may slyly remind older readers of "the peculiar institution"
(slavery), but the allusion will be lost on many undergraduates and is ill advised in any case. Readers who do
not understand
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why invocation of individual choice is virtually pre-ordained are cheated of the appreciation of cultural and commercial
contexts that would be essential to any realistic appraisal of marketing practices. In sum, Dr. Slade's commitment
gets in the way of his argument.
Fervor is, of course, not limited to public health professionals; legal academics have been known to imbue their
analyses with advocacy. Although Sugarman reviews advocates' arguments concerning the World Health Organization
Treaty, he disciplines his review to provide perspective on global efforts to regulate tobacco. Sugarman is unafraid
to comment trenchantly. He pronounces epidemic the diseases associated with consumption of tobacco, massive the
economic power of international tobacco producers and sellers, and precarious the smuggling of tobacco across borders.
However, when he reviews the proposed treaty, his tone shifts. There Sugarman entertains optimistic and pessimistic
predictions about what the treaty could and might do. I found this discussion to be advocacy that was balanced,
well informed, and exemplary.
Despite the worth of the chapters discussed above, subscribers to this REVIEW likely will concern themselves most
with politicking and litigation. Robert A. Kagan and William P. Nelson survey the politics of tobacco regulation
usefully, although instructors may want to coach students about what the authors argue. Kagan and Nelson's survey
appears in the second chapter of the collection, affording readers a crisp chronology of politics and policy.
The authors divide their chronological chart into three columns: national politics, state and local politics, and
litigation. This division may be useful for some purposes but will impair readers' appreciation of
lawsuits as civic participation by adjudicative means. At the very least, instructors will have to remind students
that authors construct chronologies via certain presumptions and that the implicit presumption that litigation
and politics are discrete categories of activity may be misleading. The authors appraise the legitimacy of litigative
politicking at chapter's end, which may ameliorate their separation of juridical from other disputing.
The thesis of the Kagan and Nelson chapter threatens to mislead less critical readers in a manner that may affect
their reading of later chapters. The authors begin their conclusion with the statement that, "On balance,
contemporary U. S. tobacco policy seems to reflect American public opinion much more than it does the preference
set of either the tobacco industry, public health activists, or antitobacco lawyers" (p. 32). Many students
will chuckle at this assessment. Such a statement in a term paper might get an undergraduate ridiculed, for even
casual observers would expect public opinion and public policy to be at greater distance from political poles than
from each other. To observe that the deepest part of a stream has, on balance, been nearer the water than the
banks does readers less service than to plumb the stream's depths and to describe how the mainstream has shifted
or persisted. If one should discover that the stream has worn a deep channel nearer to the industry's bank than
to the bank belonging to public health advocates and barristers, such a discovery might have nontrivial implications.
Despite another liquid metaphor, Robert Rabin's survey of waves of litigation is terrific, in part because he covers
the dynamics of litigative politicking so well. Rabin deftly balances academic erudition and legal savvy so that
readers may grasp
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large-scale ideological implications as well as case-specific details. He analyzes the strategies and tactics of
plaintiffs and defendants as astutely as a chess columnist. He ranges across literatures, citing journalists,
activists, practitioners, and academics as appropriate. Although instructors and students will be hard put to figure
out what is truly wave-like about tobacco litigation, most will not look for crests and troughs and so will not
be confused.
In sum, this collection will be very useful in many kinds of courses. I should assign it with enthusiasm but with
some vigilance in spots that I have noted. From the earlier compilation, I missed the attention that Michael Schudson
and Joseph Gusfield lavished on tobacco as a cultural signifier and Kagan's comparison (with David Vogel) of smoking
regulation in the United States with that in Canada and France. Nonetheless, the present volume trades some 1993
social science for some Twenty-First Century public health advocacy at a profit.
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Copyright 2002 by the author, William Haltom.