Category: reason

Many viewed the space race of the 1950s and ’60s as a battle between American free enterprise and Soviet communism. But the space program wasn’t exactly a free market endeavor.

The original purpose of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was simply to help extend the development of aviation technology into space—a federal intrusion into the economy, but not a huge one. But with the advent of the Apollo program in 1961, the agency expanded into a massive state enterprise with no room for markets. Because the space race was viewed as an urgent battle in a potentially existential war, cost was no object; the saying around the agency was “waste anything but time.” Because there was a mandate to get to the moon quickly, NASA did it in the most expensive possible way.

This unfortunately created the perception that it had been done in the only possible way. Spaceflight, according to the conventional wisdom, simply had to be accepted as an intrinsically exorbitant endeavor, something only the government of a superpower could do.

With the space shuttle, this mentality continued. NASA would develop and operate a single type of launch system, and it would use it to run a government monopoly responsible for getting all American payloads into space. It became almost impossible to raise funds for development of private rockets until the Challenger disaster in 1986 ended the use of the shuttle for commercial payloads. Fortunately, the Air Force had fought to preserve its own capabilities to get its satellites into space, so once it was no longer forced to use the shuttle for military missions it could continue with the Delta, Atlas, and Titan rockets that it had been relying on since the early ’60s.

Even with the advent of commercial launch vehicles in the early 21st century, even with the 2011 retirement of the shuttle, Congress resisted the idea of private enterprise in space. Once Mike Griffin took over NASA in 2005, George W. Bush’s 2004 Vision for Space Exploration quickly devolved from a focus on commercial launch providers to the subsequently canceled Constellation Program, with a focus on new and expensive government rockets that use shuttle components, owned and operated by the space agency. This happened because he knew that Congress would find anything else unacceptable.

Sure enough, when the Obama administration canceled that program, which was vastly over budget and falling behind schedule, space committees in both houses of Congress insisted that it be restored in the form of the Space Launch System and the Orion crew capsule. This was done on a bipartisan basis, because any fealty the Republicans had to private enterprise was vastly exceeded by their desire for NASA pork. Some, such as Sen. Richard Shelby (R–Ala.), derided the low-cost launch company SpaceX as “hobbyists in a garage.” The spectacle prompted one analyst, Polispace founder James Muncy, to declare that “Democrats don’t believe that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans don’t seem to believe that it works above it.”

Despite all this, we are now on the verge of getting affordable private access to orbit for large masses of payload and people, regardless of how much money Congress insists on wasting on NASA rockets. After years of delay, both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are expected to finally start offering suborbital flights to paying passengers in 2020. More important, both Boeing and SpaceX will be delivering crews to the International Space Station in the coming months, finally ending America’s dependence on Vladimir Putin’s Russia for space station access, which began when the shuttle was retired eight years ago.

Most important of all, two versions of an all-new fully reusable spaceship are being assembled by SpaceX in Texas and Florida; their designs will eventually converge into a single one combining the best features of each. On September 28 at the Texas site, the company’s founder, Elon Musk, described a vehicle almost 400 feet tall that would deliver 100 people to various destinations in space, with the initial capability of achieving orbit within six months, at very low marginal cost.

The work is moving at a pace unseen since the 1960s, and it could result in a true spaceflight revolution, driving the cost of orbital access down to a few tens of dollars per kilogram of payload, rather than the thousands per kilogram it’s been since the dawn of the Space Age. That would open vast new off-planet opportunities for humanity.

It will also bring to the fore a lot of ideological issues that up to now were just theoretical. Opening a frontier is hard. It’s even harder when you’re a socialist.

Most American schoolchildren are taught about the first Thanksgiving, when the Pilgrims, with the help of the indigenous people, celebrated their first successful harvest. The part of the story that often goes untold is what happened before that success—the initial failure that led to the loss of so many pioneers in the first years of the colony. It was not a result of the new environment, so different from that of the long-settled England from which the immigrants had come. It was a failure of socialism.

When the Plymouth Company adopted the settlement’s initial economic rules, it stated that “all profits & benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means” were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that “all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock.” In other words, to use a phrase from a subsequent century: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

About half the settlement died of starvation in the first winter. It was only after the colony changed its rules to allow people to keep the product of their own efforts, for their consumption or for sale, that they finally had the first bountiful harvest. This wasn’t a unique event; many of the early English settlements, including Jamestown a few years earlier, had to learn the lesson the hard way.

What are the lessons of this experience for our next frontier, the harshest one to date? Some view settlements in space as a new venue for liberty and social experimentation. But others, including the famously libertarian science fiction author Robert Heinlein, have argued that this time, the environment really is different in important ways: that the lack of gravity, of natural atmosphere, and of easily available water and food—not to mention a radiation environment for which we are not adapted—will introduce dangers that demand collective controls. Space colonists will be critically dependent on new technologies, just one mistake or failure or act of sabotage away from disaster for an entire settlement. It would be too dangerous, we’re told, to permit the kinds of freedoms that people could have had on the American western frontier. The resources needed to sustain space settlements, these critics say, will require collective, not individual efforts.

But as the technologies for living in space continue to develop, they will in fact offer more opportunities for independent living and new forms of social experimentation, including more libertarian lifestyles. For instance, use of extraterrestrial materials, such as lunar regolith (or moon dirt, for the layman), will allow construction of larger and much more robust structures to protect against vacuum breaches and radiation. Additive manufacturing using such resources will enable smaller groups to be independent in terms of equipment crucial to survival. At some point, food may be manufactured, rather than farmed, on a usefully small scale. Ultimately, of course, terraforming of Earth’s moon or Mars (or even other bodies, such as other moons) could provide the same level of safety in volume that we currently have on Earth itself.

Collectivism isn’t needed in outer space, but plenty of people will try to legally compel it there anyway. Princeton space historian Haris Durrani spoke for them when he claimed recently in The Nation that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (full name: the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) “famously opened by declaring space ‘the province of mankind.'” The treaty, which repeatedly uses the phrase “exploration and use,” in fact says that space activities “are the province of all mankind.” In any case, Durrani goes on to complain that the treaty still does not provide “strong collective property rights” (emphasis added).

The space collectivists, recognizing this “problem,” a decade later came up with the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, a.k.a. the Moon Agreement, which postulates a “regime” that ensures the solar system’s resources are used in an “equitable” way. It also outlaws private property on extraterrestrial worlds—a violation of Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For these reasons, among others, the U.S. government has refused to recognize the Moon Agreement as one of the U.N. space treaties. The current administration has repeatedly stated that space is not in fact a commons, and many (including me) have argued that the Moon Agreement’s language is fundamentally incompatible with the wording of the Outer Space Treaty and that no one should be a party to both treaties, though all who have acceded to the Moon Agreement are.

The United States became wealthy not through collectivism but through free markets, including secure contract and property rights under traditional English common law. Some have argued that the combination of Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, which forbids claims of national sovereignty, and Article VI, which requires “continuing supervision” of persons by the states that are parties to the treaty, make it legally impossible to establish those rights in space. But without them, it is extremely unlikely that space will be developed, or that the solar system’s rich resources will be harnessed to improve life on Earth and create abundant new life on other worlds.

Some will consider this a feature, not a bug. There are people both within and outside the space community who see space as, at best, a domain only for pure science—and there are people who view humanity as a curse on the planet that should not be allowed to spread beyond it.

Fortunately, there’s a strong case that this interpretation of Articles II and VI is mistaken, and that in fact property rights, whether for homesteading or for harvesting resources, can be allowed under the Outer Space Treaty. Multilateral agreements with like-minded nations could obviate the notion that doing so would be a claim of “national” sovereignty. Several figures in the space community, including me, are now working on a project to develop such agreements, with the U.S. State Department and National Space Council on board.

Space is too important to be left to government monopolies, and while space settlements shouldn’t require English common law, they must be allowed to embrace it. Socialism, like other ideologies, will be permitted off planet. But socialist space colonies will doubtless languish, as they do on Earth. It is those societies that allow individual liberty and free enterprise that will flourish, filling the solar system, and perhaps eventually the galaxy, with life, consciousness, laughter, and love.

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is quite right, I think, to criticize Babson College’s reaction:

The professor’s post was a response to President Trump’s tweeted threat to target 52 Iranian sites, including cultural sites — a threat that drew criticism and eventual disavowal following commentary that the threat, if carried out, would constitute a war crime….

It strains credulity to read Phansey’s post as sincerely advocating violence. In political rhetoric, figurative and hyperbolic language have been familiar tools for centuries, and Phansey’s post is quite obviously a criticism — not endorsement — of threats of violence, mixed with snark about American culture.

For argument’s sake, even after stripping Phansey’s post of its obvious intent, it still does not amount to unprotected speech. As we explained in a letter FIRE sent to Babson president Stephen Spinelli this afternoon, Phansey’s post simply cannot be characterized as either a “true threat” or “incitement,” which are not considered protected speech:

First, because the statement does not purport to commit Phansey to any action, it cannot amount to “a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence[.]” Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. at 359. Second, the “particular … group of individuals” identified in Phansey’s post—the Kardashians and Mall of America—reveal the sardonic tone, depriving the post of the “serious” nature necessary to remove it from its default status as protected speech.

Second, Phansey’s post is better analyzed under the incitement standard, as it (if read literally, and deprived of its context) purports to call upon Iran to issue a threat to attack particular American cultural institutions in response to President Trump’s threat. Yet even if the post had sincerely encouraged Iran to attack the United States, “mere advocacy of the use of force or violence does not remove speech from the protection of the First Amendment.” Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U.S. at 927 (emphasis in original). To amount to incitement, the speech would not only advocate unlawful force, but must also be “likely to incite or produce” imminent lawless action. Brandenburg, 395 U.S. at 447. Simply put, there is no reasonable likelihood that Phansey’s private post to his Facebook friends would lead to Iran threatening to bomb the Kardashians’ residence.

And while Babson College is a private institution, and thus not bound by the First Amendment, it does promise its faculty and students that Babson College will respect their freedom of expression. We know that from its faculty handbook, which adopts the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles, under which extramural statements such as these are insufficient to justify terminating faculty members. We also know it from other statements in its student policies, on its website, and from our experience in defending conservative students who faced punishment for celebrating Trump’s 2016 election. In that case, Babson ultimately protected freedom of expression. But not this time.

While some might prefer that faculty and students speak only in sober, considered tones, freedom of expression embraces “the right to criticize public men and measures—and that means not only informed and responsible criticism, but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation.” It certainly embraces a right to criticize our President.

Babson’s process-free departure from its stated commitments threatens to do far more damage to its reputation than a momentary social media storm ever could. To save its good name, the college should reinstate Phansey immediately.

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[Part of the argument from plaintiff’s opposition to the motion to dismiss (though see below for more):]

Viewed in context and as a whole, the following statements alleged in Plaintiff’s complaint are actionable:

[1.] “During the past couple of years, Richmond has made national news and international news as a cool place to live, to visit, to play and party. Now we’re making national news because of this fool?”

A “fool” is someone who is lacking in judgment or prudence, a harmlessly deranged person or one lacking in common powers of understanding. Plaintiff is not a fool. In truth, he is a learned man, who majored in Economics and minored in Chemistry at the University of Virginia; who received his law degree from Georgetown University; who received a Master in Laws degree from Trinity College in Ireland, and; who has won over 250 criminal jury trials.

[* * *]

In Morrissey v. WTVR, LLC, decided Thursday by Judge Henry E. Hudson (E.D. Va.), Joe Morrissey—a former Virginia legislator, a disbarred lawyer, and now a Virginia state senator (who just assumed office Wednesday)—sued a Richmond TV station over commentary by reporter Mark Holmberg; the commentary had been aired while Morrissey was unsuccessfully running for Richmond mayor. Here are some key parts of the analysis (as usual in excerpts I post, some paragraph breaks added, and moved text marked with curly braces):

The setting of this lawsuit is a commentary aired on September 2, 2016 by a CBS 6 reporter entitled “Richmond’s Mayor Morrissey?” According to the Complaint, the commentary was republished online in an article with the headline “Holmberg: OMG: Sextin’ Joe Morrissey is leading the mayor’s race!” Morrissey contends that during the broadcast, Holmberg falsely stated, “During the past couple of years, Richmond has made national news and international news as a cool place to live, to visit, to play and party. Now we’re making national news because of this fool?” Morrissey characterizes this allegedly false statement as “the product of spite, ill-will, and an overt desire to discredit and destroy Joe’s reputation for being extremely intelligent.”

The next comment at issue concerns Morrissey’s son. The Complaint alleges that

“Holmberg intentionally spliced together Joe’s comments regarding his son, Chase, and Holmberg’s statement that Joe was ‘lying’, to make it appear that Joe was ‘lying’ about being Chase’s father. During the interview, Joe stated, ‘do you think for a moment if that child [Chase] is mine, I would run from that? Not—not going to happen.'”

At this point, after airing a clip of the prior interview, Morrissey alleges that Holmberg stated, “He was lying to me then. He’s lied to the investigators and everybody else in this case. That’s why the state bar is coming after him, again.” Morrissey maintains that this portion of the presentation was an intentionally spliced clip of the interview and that his “accusation that Joe lied is malicious, spiteful, the product of ill-will, and is an overt attempt to discredit and destroy Joe’s reputation for honesty and integrity.” Morrissey added in his Complaint that “at the time of the on air ‘interview’, there was no evidence that the Virginia State Bar was ‘coming after Morrissey again.'”

Morrissey next contends that Holmberg’s statement that Morrissey “famously and stupidly published a plan[t]ation style ‘Gone with the Wind’ photo of himself and his wife” was defamatory. Morrissey alleges that Holmberg’s statements “evince a clear hatred of [him] with clear racial implications.”

Finally, Morrissey draws the Court’s attention to Holmberg’s concluding comment: “Do we really want to elect this clown, this nonstop, one ring circus, this liar? Or do we want to elect somebody that’s gonna lift us up to the heights that Richmond so richly deserves?” Morrissey contends that “[t]hese false accusations impute to Joe dishonesty, a lack of intelligence, lack of character, lack of sincerity and resolution to perform the duties of Mayor and imply that Joe is unfit to be Mayor of the City of Richmond.” {[Morrissey] describes Holmberg’s remarks as imputing his unfitness to serve as mayor and portraying him as a “stupid liar, who was a sex crazed maniac.”}

The district court dismissed the complaint, reasoning:

[1.] Holmberg’s commentary would be clearly understood as commentary, rather than an interview of Morrissey, and is (as a matter of law) not libelous. Among other things, as the opinion later reasons,

[To be actionable, statements must] have “a provably false factual connotation and thus [be] capable of being proven true or false.” “[T]he verifiability of the statement in question [is] a minimum threshold issue.” “When a statement is relative in nature and depends largely on a speaker’s viewpoint, that statement is an expression of opinion.”

Aside from being nonfactual, much of the commentary at issue is tame in light of the tenor of contemporary political debate. This is particularly true of such amorphous terms as “fool,” “famously and stupidly,” “this clown, this nonstop, one ring circus, this liar.” While such language may be insulting and derogatory, it does not have the requisite defamatory sting. When public figures enter the political arena, they have voluntarily exposed themselves to increased risks from defamatory falsehood concerning them.

[2.] Some of the allegations, the court concludes, are substantially factual, or at least not said knowing they were false or likely false:

[A]n opinion issued by the Supreme Court of Virginia in 2019 affirming a lower court’s revocation of Morrissey’s license to practice law … appears to confirm a factual basis for much of Holmberg’s commentary. The Supreme Court of Virginia’s opinion supported allegations that Morrissey had been convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor by engaging in a sexual relationship with a juvenile female and made false statements concerning their relationship. The court also noted Morrissey’s “long and notorious book” of disciplinary history with the State Bar….

Morrissey alleges that Holmberg’s characterization of the Virginia State Bar’s investigation of his conduct is false and defamatory. According to the Complaint, Holmberg said the following: “He was lying to me then. He’s lied to the investigators and everybody else in this case. That’s why the state bar is coming after him, again.” … Morrissey, through counsel, contends that either directly or by implication the comment accuses him of what could be construed to be a criminal offense. However, a careful reading of the Supreme Court of Virginia’s opinion in Morrissey v. Virginia State Bar provides some factual basis for Holmberg’s comments. The deception noted by Holmberg appears to evolve from Morrissey’s conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The Court’s opinion states that

“Morrissey testified that he was not aware of [the young lady’s] actual age. At the hearing, he pointed to, among other things, the fact that she listed an incorrect birthdate on her job application…. The Bar produced ample evidence that Morrissey actually knew [the young lady] was a minor…. The bar points out that Morrissey, in fact, knew [the young lady’s] true age, [she] was an employee subject to his supervision, Morrissey engaged in sexual relations with her in his law office, and then he bragged about it. The Bar argues that Morrissey should have been ‘guiding associates and law firm staff in in the ethical practice of law. Instead, his misconduct shows a lack of judgment and clear disregard for the rule of law.’ …

“In January 2015, after the entry of Morrissey’s Alford plea, a special prosecutor brought additional charges of felony uttering a forged public record, felony conspiracy to utter a forged record, felony inducing perjury, and perjury. The Bar referred to these charges as ‘Morrissey II.’ The charges stemmed from the allegation that Morrissey had employed a forged court order during the hearing on Morrissey’s Alford plea. The circuit court dismissed the indictments in Morrissey II on the basis that the immunity provision of Morrissey’s plea agreement foreclosed this additional prosecution….”

With respect to Holmberg’s statement, “[t]hat’s why the state bar is coming after him, again,” the Supreme Court of Virginia’s opinion in Morrissey v. Virginia State Bar shows a reasonable factual basis for Holmberg’s opinion. In 2015, following the dismissal of the charges pending against Morrissey in the Henrico County Circuit Court, “the Virginia State Bar began its investigation and issued subpoenas duces tecum to four of [Morrissey’s] criminal defense attorneys.” “On March 24, 2016, at a hearing before the Henrico County Circuit Court, [Morrissey] agreed to turn over his attorneys’ files to the VSB, omitting nothing.”

Clearly, a reporter with access to public records could reasonably conclude that Morrissey was under investigation by the Virginia State Bar at the time of the commentary at issue—and that the investigation included making false statements in connection with the accusations against him…. “[I]n the context of the actual malice inquiry, a duty to investigate the accuracy of one’s statements does not arise until the publisher of those statements has a high degree of subjective awareness of their probable falsity.”

[3.] As to “Morrissey’s publication of what Holmberg characterized as a “plantation style ‘Gone with the Wind’ photo of himself and his wife,'”

Morrissey alleges that “[i]n fact, Joe’s wife is African-American. Again, Holmberg’s statements evince a clear hatred of Joe with clear racial implications.” Morrissey denies publishing a “plantation style photo” to anyone.

Morrissey contends that Holmberg’s characterization, coupled with his display of the photo, portrayed a defamatory implication of racism. However, the apparent import of Holmberg’s display of the photo was to demonstrate his view of Morrissey’s judgment. As with any political commentary, a reader could draw a defamatory inference if they were so inclined, but nothing said by Holmberg necessarily kindled a suggestion of racism.

Defamatory implication is not analogous to psychoanalytical free association in which a therapist asks a person to freely share anything that comes to mind—i.e., what does this image remind you of? To state a plausible claim, the defamatory implication must be firmly moored to the allegedly defamatory language or image.

“[A]llegedly defamatory words are to be taken in their plain and natural meaning and to be understood by courts and juries as other people would understand them, and according to the sense in which they appear to have been used.” The words accompanying Holmberg’s display of the photograph neither support a reasonable implication of racist overtone, as Morrissey contends, nor an actionable claim of defamation.

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Hours before Americans began raising champagne flutes and toasting the arrival of the New Year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced its final guidance for food-labeling regulations that manufacturers that must comply with.

The agency’s timing for the announcement, which centers on changes to the mandatory Nutrition Facts label that appears on virtually all packaged foods regulated by the FDA, wasn’t great. First, it makes the classic Friday news dump seem rather ostentatious, given the FDA released the guidance on New Year’s Eve eve. Food executives who were spending time with their families or in line at the liquor store probably missed the guidance—which appeared in the Federal Register on New Year’s Eve itself. Add to that the fact the regulations the FDA’s guidance is intended to explain took effect on January 1—mere hours after the agency released that guidance.

The timing has meant grocers such as Whole Foods and PCC (a co-op in Seattle, where I live) have been scrambling to explain the changes to their customers.

Still, though the timing of the guidance is inopportune, it would be unfair to characterize it as some sort of FDA “gotcha” targeting the food industry. The rules apply right now only to very large food producers—those with at least $10 million in annual food sales. What’s more, the agency is giving food manufacturers six months to come into compliance with the rules. And, according to the FDA Law Blog, last week’s agency guidance differs only slightly from an earlier draft guidance.

But the tardiness of the FDA’s guidance is hardly the only knock against the new rules. In fact, it’s not even among my chief complaints.

If the old “Nutrition Facts” label wasn’t great, then the revised label is hardly an improvement. Visually, it moves some things around and plays with fonts and bold text. As Today.com explains, the new label displays caloric information “in a larger font size[,] and the numbers will be bolder.” 

Does a little bold text here and a slightly larger font matter? Probably not. A study I cite here found that only 9 percent of consumers read calorie counts on food labels.

My real complaints, though, concern the substance of the label itself.

For one thing, the “facts” the Nutrition Facts label rests upon might more properly be dubbed the Nutrition Opinions label. After all, the Nutrition Facts label reflects the opinions and recommendations of a federal panel of dietary and nutrition experts. As with the current revision—but unlike actual facts pertaining to human nutrition—that label changes from time to time. Perhaps most importantly, the dietary and nutrition experts’ recommendations, as I’ve explained, rests on shaky ground.

Much has been made of changes to the recommended serving sizes of various foods that appear on the Nutrition Fact label. While serving sizes that reflect the quantities a person actually eats in one sitting make sense logically—a serving size of ice cream, for example, jumped under the new rules from a paltry half cup to a more robust three-quarters of a cup—I’m not sure if the new label requirements add any clarity here. After all, these numbers are averages at best. What’s more, the agency’s new reference amounts for breakfast cereals, for example, suggest a serving size of 20 grams for children ages 1-3 but anywhere between 15 grams and 60 grams for adults.

I’m not sure that makes sense. Then again, this is the same agency that issued a 36-page guidance document in 2018 that contains the words “Serving Size for Breath Mints” in its title.

Finally, some supporters of the revised labels argue that the push to list “added sugar” on the Nutrition Facts label will lead food manufacturers to reduce the amount of sugar they add to foods—in response to consumer demands spurred by the revised label.

It might do that. (Consumers were already angling to consume less sugar before the label change.) But the label will most definitely mislead and confuse consumers greatly. That’s because the “added sugar” requirement, I wrote in 2016, “creates a deceptive health halo around products like orange juice and apple juice, which are high in naturally occurring sugar but [often] contain no added sugar.”

According to the FDA, the new Nutrition Facts label is intended to help consumers make more informed choices and to combat obesity and heart disease. That’s a pipe dream. A 2012 study by E.U. researchers found “no real-life evidence exists linking nutrition label use with measured changes in body weight.” Instead, the authors determined that “price, taste, convenience, and shopping habits are simply far more important than nutrition information when making food purchasing decisions.“

Ultimately, the very small subset of eaters who focus on the minutiae of nutrition data on food labels may be the only ones excited by or capitalizing on them. Years from now, when those same people propose yet another revision to the Nutrition Facts label—this time we’ll get it right—please greet them with the skepticism they deserve.

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11/11/1830: Justice John McLean takes oath.

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The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette, by Jacob Grier, Kindle Direct, 267 pages, $14.99

The Cigarette: A Political History, by Sarah Milov, Harvard University Press, 394 pages, $35

When Clara Gouin started running the Group Against Smokers’ Pollution (GASP) out of her College Park, Maryland, living room in 1971, she was rebelling against social norms she deemed oppressive. “Gouin was a housewife and the mother of two daughters, the youngest of whom had an allergy to smoke,” University of Virginia historian Sarah Milov writes in The Cigarette: A Political History. “The child’s reaction to cigarettes was so severe that it prevented the family from going out to eat. Even worse than being restricted in public was the expectation that nonsmokers had to accommodate smoking guests in their own homes. Ashtrays in the homes of nonsmokers were monuments to smokers’ supremacy. ‘What doormats we were!’ Gouin recalled thinking as she lay awake one night contemplating nonsmokers’ powerlessness.”

The understandable grievances of put-upon nonsmokers like Gouin gave birth to a movement that ultimately banished smokers from nearly every place they might want to light up. In many jurisdictions, that includes outdoor spaces. Sometimes it even includes smokers’ own homes. Half a century after Gouin founded GASP, as Jacob Grier shows in The Rediscovery of Tobacco, the dwindling minority of cigarette smokers (15 percent of American adults in 2019, per Gallup, down from 45 percent in 1954) is the group with the more plausible complaint of oppression.

Grier—a writer, bartender, and cocktail consultant who enjoys the occasional cigar and pipe but says humanity would have been far better off if the mass-produced cigarette had never been invented—is by no means calling for a return to the situation that Gouin found intolerable. “The proper path,” he says, “lies somewhere between ignorant pleasure and outright prohibition.”

Grier argues, for example, that state and local governments should allow smoking among consenting adults in certain contexts, such as bars and restaurants that want to offer the option. Even that modest plea is bound to provoke the ire of activists who will settle for nothing less than the “smoke-free society” that C. Everett Koop, surgeon general during the Reagan administration, deemed achievable “by the year 2000.” Unlike Milov, who tells the story of the anti-smoking movement mainly as a triumph of public-spirited citizens over conniving capitalists, Grier details the costs of that victory, including unjustified coercion, politicized science, and a fanatical refusal to admit that different kinds of nicotine consumption pose different levels of risk.

Even Milov acknowledges that the push for smoking bans sometimes got ahead of the science concerning the dangers of secondhand smoke. Koop’s “rather sweeping statements” on the subject in the preface to his 1986 report The Health Consequences of Involuntary Smoking, she notes, “gave way in the subsequent 300 pages to much more hedged and nuanced interpretations of scientific studies.” At that point, she says, secondhand smoke was “an issue where actual uncertainty existed, where scientists of good faith disagreed on the magnitude of the risk if not on the existence of risk itself.”

Although Milov leaves readers with the impression that the uncertainty was subsequently eliminated, Grier shows that the scientific case against secondhand smoke has never been as strong as activists and public health officials claimed. He notes a telling 2013 article published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute under the headline “No Clear Link Between Passive Smoking and Lung Cancer.” The article described a large prospective study of 76,000 women that “confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke.” While “we don’t want people to conclude that passive smoking has no effect on lung cancer,” one of the researchers said, “this analysis doesn’t tell us what the risk is, or even if there is a risk.”

An expert quoted by the journal, University of Chicago oncologist Jyoti Patel, “said the findings were not new,” adding: “Passive smoking has many downstream health effects—asthma, upper respiratory infections, other pulmonary diseases, cardiovascular disease—but only borderline increased risk of lung cancer. The strongest reason to avoid passive cigarette smoke is to change societal behavior: to not live in a society where smoking is a norm.” Another expert, Medical University of South Carolina internist Gerard Silvestri, said “it’s only the heaviest exposure that produces the risk.” He added that we “kind of knew that before.”

Those measured remarks, published by an eminent journal, came after decades when activists successfully lobbied for smoking bans by implying that the slightest whiff of tobacco smoke just might kill you, emphasizing the lung cancer risk in particular. The overriding goal, as Patel acknowledged, was not to dispense scientifically informed health advice but to denormalize smoking.

Having won that war, tobacco controllers can afford to speak a bit more candidly about the hazards of secondhand smoke. “In previous decades,” Grier notes, “any researcher caught saying such a thing would have been hounded relentlessly by their peers and scrutinized for the most tenuous ties to Big Tobacco. What changed? Not the science, but the politics.”

Some activists, such as Stanton Glantz, a co-founder of Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights who now directs the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, went beyond downplaying the subtleties of the scientific evidence. Since 2003, Glantz has been promoting the highly implausible claim that bans on smoking in bars and restaurants cause immediate and dramatic reductions in heart attacks—as large as 60 percent, according to his initial report. While substantial post-ban drops can be observed in small, cherry-picked cities, those putative effects disappear when researchers look at large populations or large numbers of jurisdictions and take into account pre-existing trends.

The claim that smoking bans instantly and conspicuously reduce heart attacks was nevertheless parroted by advocates of such laws, credulously reported by news outlets, and even endorsed by a 2009 Institute of Medicine report, which omitted one of the most important countervailing studies. “The myth that banning smoking in bars and restaurants will bring about astounding reductions in the rate of heart attacks is now dead and buried in the scientific literature,” Grier observes, “but for years the false promise of heart miracles has influenced public debate.”

Grier also considers attempts to generate alarm about “thirdhand smoke”: tobacco combustion residue lurking in rooms where people have smoked or on the clothing and bodies of smokers themselves. If “fear of secondhand smoke alienated smokers by forcing them to step outside,” he writes, “fear of thirdhand smoke makes them untouchable pariahs.” Such fearmongering “exposes the extent to which the anti-smoking movement has abandoned scientific credibility,” he says. “Prominent anti-tobacco researchers…will promote any finding that helps delegitimize tobacco use, no matter how far-fetched or unsupported by the evidence.”

That trend also disturbs Boston University public health professor Michael Siegel, a longtime anti-smoking activist and former Glantz protégé who nowadays regularly criticizes the alarmist claims and ad hominem reasoning of his erstwhile allies. Siegel is especially dismayed by the anti-smoking movement’s irrational resistance to e-cigarettes as a harm-reducing alternative to conventional, combustible cigarettes.

“Driven by an almost puritanical inability to accept the fact that a person could obtain pleasure from nicotine without it killing them,” Siegel says in a blog post that Grier quotes, “we have made the demonization of vaping the solitary goal of the movement, at the direct expense of what I always believed was our primary goal: to make smoking history.” For dissidents like Siegel, it’s clear that vaping—which is indisputably far less dangerous than smoking—should be embraced as a public health boon by people who say they want to reduce the death and disease caused by cigarettes.

Grier, who disdains cigarettes but would like to encourage an appreciation of high-quality tobacco products akin to the “slow food,” craft cocktail, and microbrew movements, does not exactly share Siegel’s goal of making smoking history. But both critics agree that activists have gone too far in stigmatizing smokers, sacrificing truth on the altar of ideology, and reflexively tarring anyone who disagrees with them as shills for Big Tobacco. The anti-smoking establishment’s generally hostile reaction to e-cigarettes, which superficially resemble the real thing but contain no tobacco and do not burn anything, is a sure sign that something has gone terribly wrong with a movement that once claimed to champion science.

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