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Amazon.com: Global Tobacco Control: Power, Policy, Governance and Transfer 

The first major book by political scientists explaining global tobacco control policy. It identifies a history of minimal tobacco control then charts the extent to which governments have regulated tobacco in the modern era. It identifies major policy change from the post-war period and uses theories of public policy to help explain the change.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is an excellent case study in which the authors provide a thorough account of global tobacco control issues using political and public policy analysis. The book is clearly written, accessible and will be of great interest to students of politics, policy analysis and public health."

- Rob Baggott, Professor, Health Policy Research Unit, De Montfort University, UK

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Professor’s new book takes political, cultural look at tobacco policies  

West Virginia University political science Professor Donley Studlar has published a new book that evaluates tobacco policies around the world.

"Global Tobacco Control: Power, Policy, Governance and Transfer," explores the history of the tobacco industry and major concerns in the market.

The book focuses on the gap between policy problems in the industry and government response across the globe, in addition to the vast changes in the system over the past 60 years, Studlar said.

"Smoking is a very culturally and economically embedded practice in many countries. One of the most remarkable things is how much change there has been," he said. "While policies still vary in Western, industrialized countries, there's been a convergence of policies as information has diffused concerning the dangers of cigarette smoking, as well as how different countries have dealt with them."

Studlar said the modern view on smoking in the United States has contributed to economic shifts in the marketplace.

"In the 1950s, cigarette smoking was just normal and no one really objected to the situation. Today, smoking is denormalized, and there are restrictions on tobacco," he said. "What we're trying to do in this book is explore that shift - how it came about and the differences across countries."

"Smoking is usually thought of as a public health issue, but it's also a very political issue, and the fact that it is perceived differently in different countries indicates that."

Smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the world, but many countries do not possess any laws regulating smoking, he said.

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Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry 

Tobacco Capitalism tells the story of the people who live and work on U.S. tobacco farms at a time when the global tobacco industry is undergoing profound changes. Against the backdrop of the antitobacco movement, the globalization and industrialization of agriculture, and intense debates over immigration, Peter Benson draws on years of field research to examine the moral and financial struggles of growers, the difficult conditions that affect Mexican migrant workers, and the complex politics of citizenship and economic decline in communities dependent on this most harmful commodity.

Benson tracks the development of tobacco farming since the plantation slavery period and the formation of a powerful tobacco industry presence in North Carolina. In recent decades, tobacco companies that sent farms into crisis by aggressively switching to cheaper foreign leaf have coached growers to blame the state, public health, and aggrieved racial minorities for financial hardship and feelings of vilification. Economic globalization has exacerbated social and racial tensions in North Carolina, but the corporations that benefit have rarely been considered a key cause of harm and instability, and have now adopted social-responsibility platforms to elide liability for smoking disease. Parsing the nuances of history, power, and politics in rural America, Benson explores the cultural and ethical ambiguities of tobacco farming and offers concrete recommendations for the tobacco-control movement in the United States and worldwide.

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• New book examines public health, cultural, off-shoring impact of U.S. tobacco industry  

What has been neglected is research on tobacco production in the United States, and specifically on the people who work and live in the rural, traditional tobacco-growing areas of North Carolina.

Benson’s new book, Tobacco Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2011), examines the impact of the transformation of the tobacco industry on farmers, workers and the American public. It reveals public health threats, the impact of off-shoring, and the immigration issues related to tobacco production.

The book also examines the new public relations strategies of the tobacco industry and its recent corporate social responsibility “makeover”.

“There are whole groups of people — farmers and farm workers — in our society who dedicate themselves to growing a crop that is vilified,” says Benson, assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences.

“But this book is not just about good people doing a bad thing. What I found was, in going to North Carolina and going to these farms, that the story becomes much more complex.”

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Book Talk - Unlikely Friendship Shines Light on Persecution 

The two main characters in Elliot Perlman's vast novel "The Street Sweeper" are both jolted from their private miseries by meeting a dying Auschwitz survivor and patient at the hospital, whose stories about making it out of a Nazi death camp alive feed into tales about the U.S. Civil Rights movement.

Perlman, an Australian native and former lawyer, said the seed for the book came from watching the diverse mix of people who stood smoking outside of Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital and wondering what would happen if two totally unlikely companions were thrown together there.

Q: You're dealing with some big themes. How did you move from them to the characters?

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• Inherently Bad, and Bad Only – ebook available 

Marc Linder, University of Iowa College of Law writes:

I'm a law professor at the University of Iowa teaching a course on the History of the Regulation of Smoking and Tobacco in the United States who would like to bring to Tobacco Control readers' attention my just published very lengthy web-only free-access book on this subject.

"Inherently Bad, and Bad Only": A History of State-Level Regulation of Cigarettes and Smoking in the United States Since the 1880s. Volume 1: An In-Depth National Study Embedding Ultra-Thick Description of a Representative State (Iowa)

This book lays out empirical and methodological underpinnings for studying the early period of anti-cigarette legislation in the United States by overcoming the lack of primary source-based historical scholarship. Constantly repeating wildly erroneous claims at second, third, and more remote hand, anti-smoking academics and pro-tobacco apologists have fundamentally distorted history, on the one hand by dismissing the early anti-cigarette movement as merely religiously and morally motivated and the legislation it secured as unenforced exercises bereft of historical relevance, and, on the other by absurdly magnifying its achievements. Reconstruction of the national scope of the real course of the passage and repeal of statewide legislative bans on cigarette sales to adults from the late 1880s until 1927 pays special attention to the non-governmental driving forces of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's health-based support of and the monopolistic American Tobacco Company's opposition to such interference with consumer freedom. In this panoramic analysis is embedded ultra-thick description of the enactment, enforcement, and repeal processes in Iowa as a representative state. In order to present the full sweep of tobacco control regulation, the narrative continues into the present, under the new circumstances of a mass movement and monolithic scientific warnings of secondhand smoke exposure's lethality, by capturing the shift in focus to anti-public smoking legislation-which had, ironically, originated just as sales ban repeals were spreading in the wake of World War I-again using developments in Iowa

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Tobacco Control in Africa 

‘Tobacco use in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing rapidly as a result of strong economic growth and the aggressive marketing tactics of tobacco multinationals. Although the policy interventions are well understood, the political economy of tobacco control in Sub-Saharan Africa is not, and this volume is a timely addition to the literature, offering the most comprehensive review of the political economy of tobacco control in Sub-Saharan Africa yet. The attention to detail in the 12 country case studies – representing diverse linguistic, geographic, political, legal and developmental environments – sets new standards for tobacco control research on the continent.’ —Dr Evan Blecher, International Tobacco Control Research Program, American Cancer Society

This volume presents the work initiated and executed under the African Tobacco Situational Analyses (ATSA), a recent major public health initiative sponsored by the Canadian government’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Conceived to illuminate the factors that will facilitate the reform of Africa’s major public health policies, this program focused particularly (but not exclusively) on policies concerning tobacco. The results, presented in this book, are an important contribution to the literature on global public health and international development, and comprise the most comprehensive evidence-based analysis of tobacco policy in the African region.

The country-level analyses of this study examine topics such as smoking prevalence, the status of relevant smoking-related policies, and the politics of public health policy reform – as well as the role played by the tobacco industry in each of these key areas.

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• No space for cigarettes in HK public libraries  

The ban on smoking in certain premises do not only refer to physically lighting up cigars. The Hong Kong Public Library took it a step further to declare that any mention of cigarette products in any of its periodicals were promptly dealt with.

Proof is a page taken out of Popular Mechanics that is actually an advertisement of a "100% organically grown" tobacco. Oops, it is still visible through the white censor sheet but nevertheless, it is a consistent effort to suppress the promotion of cigarettes and tobaccos in public library premises.

Good one!

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Golden Holocaust : Robert N. Proctor  

The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.

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VIDEO: CBC Books - Should the cigarette industry be abolished? 

Without doubt, Canada's smoking and tobacco laws have become stricter in the past decade. We've seen numerous provinces enact public smoking bans and the use of larger and more graphic health warning labels on the packaging.

But Stanford history of science professor Robert Proctor doesn't think our laws go far enough. In fact, he doesn't think any laws that don't completely abolish the manufacture and sale of cigarettes go far enough.

"We ban all kinds of things," Proctor said to Q host Jian Ghomeshi recently. "We ban lead paint, we ban children's toys that can be swallowed, we ban asbestos insulation, and in Canada, I guess, we even ban electronic cigarettes. But the really big killer...the biggest killer in the history of human civilization, we actually tolerate."

In his new book Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, Proctor argues that people should have the right to smoke, but that the multi-billion-dollar tobacco industry should go up in smoke for selling a "product that has all kinds of the world of filth in it."

Despite all the advertising, PSA commercials and health education in schools, Proctor believes average Canadians still don't know what really goes into a commercially produced cigarette.

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Pasadena cigarette king Kinney on the power of eucalyptus  

PASADENA - Historical research is now aided by the ability to download old books at no cost. One of these books is "Eucalyptus," written by Abbot Kinney and published in 1895.

Much has been written about Kinney, the rich cigarette company owner who founded Kinneloa Ranch in East Pasadena. Kinney also founded the community of Venice, a small version of the Italian city, near Santa Monica.

Kinney, along with Helen Hunt Jackson of Ramona fame, wrote a report on the condition of the Mission Indians in 1883. He served as chairman of the California Board of Forestry, helped preserve trees in the San Gabriel Mountains and opened a forestry research station in Rustic Canyon near Santa Monica.

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Stanford Historian Exposes Tobacco Industry: Top 5 Common Myths about Tobacco 

Stanford Historian Professor Robert Proctor, a foe of the tobacco industry has a new 750-page book out that exposes the corruption and evils of the tobacco industry and how it affects mankind today and in the future. The book titled “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition” is a comprehensive look at the abuses of the tobacco industry and how it is literally killing off America. A Stanford University news release provides a peek at the book by revealing Professor Proctor’s top 5 common myths about tobacco.

According to a Stanford University news release, historian Robert Proctor is a man whom the tobacco industry fears. Fear so much, that Professor Proctor has had to personally invest $50,000 in legal fees to fight off legal action by the tobacco industry to stop the creation and publication of his book.

Professor Proctor’s message is simple: the tobacco industry is killing American with cigarettes and using the most egregious methods to accomplish this result. In a news release, Professor Proctor states that cigarettes are "the deadliest artifact in the history of civilization" – more than bullets, more than atom bombs, more than traffic accidents or wars or heroin addiction combined. . . .

Myth #1: Nobody smokes anymore—Professor Proctor says that this is an illusion and that the number of the poor who take up smoking are not included in reports on smoking. Furthermore, he points out that the popular trends of cigar and hookah smoking are just as dangerous as cigarette smoking.

Myth #2: The tobacco industry has turned over a new leaf—Professor Proctor points out that the tobacco industry has never admitted to wrong doing in spite of proof otherwise; and furthermore, that it is expanding to other nations with the same illegal practices it used in America.

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VIDEO: 750 pages of tobacco conspiracy 

'The industry has spent tens of billions designing cigarettes since the 1940s – that's from the industry's own documents,' Robert Proctor said.

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• Tobacco industry dying? Not so fast, says Stanford expert 

The cigarette industry is not dying. It continues to reap unimaginable profits. It's still winning lawsuits. And cigarettes still kill millions every year.

So says Stanford's Robert Proctor, author of the new bombshell study, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, a book the tobacco industry tried to stop with subpoenas and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Proctor, the first historian to testify in court against the tobacco industry (in 1998), warns that the worst of the health catastrophe is still ahead of us: Thanks to the long-term effects of cigarettes, "If everyone stopped smoking today, there would still be millions of deaths a year for decades to come."

"Low-tar" cigarettes? "Light" cigarettes? Better filters? Forget it, he said. They don't work. Today's cigarettes are deadlier even than those made 60 years ago, gram for gram.

Half the people who smoke will die from their habit. A surprising number will die from stroke and heart attacks, not cancer.

Moreover, he asks, "How many people know that tobacco is a major cause of blindness, baldness and bladder cancer, not to mention cataracts, ankle fractures, early onset menopause, ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion and erectile dysfunction?" . . .

His 750-page book, a decade in the making, has already earned high praise, with terms like "a real page-turner," "a must-read," "the most important book on smoking in 50 years."

"This book is a remarkable compendium of evil," wrote Columbia's David Rosner, an author of Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. "It will keep you spinning from page one through the last. … It is the type of book that makes you wonder how, in God's name, this could have happened." . . .

He also marshals evidence to show that smoking contributes substantially to environmental damage, even global warming: "When we finally decide to take seriously the problem of global climate change, cigarettes will come under increasing scrutiny. Tobacco agriculture and cigarette manufacturing have heavy carbon footprints - think deforestation and petrochemical pesticides - and cigarettes are leading causes of fires and industrial accidents. There's not much room for cigarettes in an environmentally conscious world." . . .

"There's hundreds of things people don't know about smoking," said Proctor. Myths have instead lulled the public into complacency. . . .

Proctor also said that in the United States, a "Kafkaesque world" divides smokers and non-smokers. The industry has computerized databases of virtually all smokers and spends over $400 per smoker per year on special offers, coupons, sign-ups and other direct mail approaches - an unseen world to non-smokers. "This is precisely how the industry wants it; a fungus always grows best in the dark," he writes.

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This book is a remarkable compendium of evil. It will keep you spinning from page one through the last. … It is the type of book that makes you wonder how, in God's name, this could have happened.
Columbia's David Rosner, on Robert Proctor's new book, the bombshell, "Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition."

Bloomsbury to launch ‘The Tobacco Keeper’ 

The Tobacco Keeper is for anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East. The book written by Ali Bader and translated by Amira Nowaira will be published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing on December 5.

Long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2009, The Tobacco Keeper is an ambitious and exciting novel, written by one of the rising stars of Arabic literature. It spans five decades of turbulent Middle East history, making it essential reading ‘for anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East’ said Baghdad News in a review.

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