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Henry Waxman's book reveals lessons learned  

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is this year's man of the hour. As chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he has been at the center of both health care and climate change legislation, in addition to being a political fixture who has kept K Street and Capitol Hill scrambling for three decades.

His new book, "The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works," written with The Atlantic's Joshua Green, offers meaty -- though at times self-serving -- advice for people who want to get things done on the Hill.

But the book isn't all business. Waxman, one of the Hill's most ferocious crusaders against Big Tobacco, reveals that he is a reformed smoker (not to mention an ex-gas guzzler). "In high school, I would tool around Los Angeles in my green-and-white Buick, dragging on a cigarette and imagining myself the epitome of cool," he writes. Waxman quit smoking after college but relapsed upon coming to Congress, where the tobacco lobby stocked cigarettes at major events, meetings and congressional business trips. "Before long, I was hooked again and mortified to be so, since I was already becoming known as a crusader against tobacco. Driven by a deep sense of embarrassment, I managed to quit for good."

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'The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works' by Henry Waxman with Joshua Green  

his account of his congressional career is fascinatingly detailed, filled with blunt behind-the-scenes anecdotes and crisply drawn portraits of allies and opponents.

Most of all, it's a detailed inside account of just how the nation's laws are made. It succeeds as storytelling because Waxman and Green have structured most of the book as a series of narrative examples built around major bills. Thus chapters are titled, for instance, "HIV/AIDS and the Ryan White Act," "The Orphan Drug Act," "The Clean Air Act" and "The Tobacco Wars." There's a fascinating chapter on baseball and steroids as well.

Most of all, there's a persuasive declaration of faith in that particular brand of liberalism that the late Arthur Schlesinger called "the politics of remedy." As Waxman puts it, "In Boyle Heights, everyone thought of government as an institution that helped people."

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• POLITICS: Moustache of Justice  

Henry Waxman is to Congress what Ted Williams was to baseball -- a natural. As you read this nicely proportioned, fast- paced book, you realize that Waxman was born to be a member of the House, ideally the chairman of an important committee. He's just five-feet-five, he's woefully short of hair, he's neither charming nor funny, but none of that has mattered. Waxman has been one of the most effective members of Congress for 35 years.

Part of being a natural in Congress is owning a healthy ego. Ego can be the fuel on which the legislative branch runs, and Waxman is in no danger of running out of gas. He makes this clear in the first pages of his book, ably co-authored by Joshua Green, a senior editor of the Atlantic Monthly: "Nearly every worthwhile fight in my career began with my being badly outmatched," Waxman confides. "The other guys always have more money. That's why Congress is so important. Run as it should be, it ensures that no special interest can ever be powerful enough to eclipse the public interest." . . .

In these pages Waxman teaches the importance of good staff work, patience and the willingness to make unexpected alliances to advance your causes. He believes in oversight hearings, Congress's most basic tool, but one that has fallen into disrepair through disuse. He begins and almost ends the book with what must have been his favorite hearing of all time, one he held on April 14, 1994, just months before he and his Democratic colleagues would pass into the minority in the House, a kind of purgatory for an activist like Waxman.

On that occasion Waxman presided over the self-immolation of the seven chief executives of America's biggest tobacco companies, who, despite mountains of compelling evidence to the contrary, testified clumsily and unpersuasively, under oath, that they never believed smoking cigarettes was addictive. This hearing generated no immediate legislation, but it helped destroy the reputation of American tobacco companies and surely contributed to the environment that produced any number of new controls on smoking and the mammoth tobacco settlement with the states in the years that followed. . . .

"The Waxman Report" explains, at least, how Congress can work, and it is fun to read. You finish it with gratitude to the voters of Beverly Hills and nearby areas who keep returning this ornery fellow to the House to challenge entrenched special interests. More Henry Waxmans on both sides of the aisle would give us a much better Congress than the one we've got.

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Maryland Notebook: Secrets of Grass-Roots Organizer's Success 

Most Annapolis insiders know Vinnie DeMarco as an indefatigable advocate for universal health care, beloved by progressive Democrats and dismissed by conservatives. As executive director of the nonprofit Maryland Citizens Health Initiative, he's a familiar face to reporters: a friendly nudge, always looking for publicity for his causes.

Now comes a book by Michael Pertschuk, a consumer advocate and a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, that immortalizes DeMarco and his story as a template for successful grass-roots organizing.

"The DeMarco Factor: Transforming Public Will Into Political Power," scheduled to be published in the spring by Vanderbilt University Press, chronicles DeMarco's successful campaigns against the National Rifle Association, the tobacco lobby, Wal-Mart and the health-care industry.

Pertschuk explains how DeMarco, a former leader of the Maryland Young Democrats, has, since the 1980s, organized broad coalitions of health policy advocates, unions, churches and faith communities and even some business interests to help defeat the state's gun and tobacco lobbies with tougher gun control laws and higher cigarette taxes.

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Puritanism disguised as science 

I'm sitting in the corner of a bar, talking to author Christopher Snowdon and doing something almost unheard of in Britain these days: enjoying a cigarette under cover. Admittedly, it is a pretty open-air kind of 'under cover' in a specially adapted part of the Boisdale restaurant and bar near London's Victoria station; still, the novelty value is not lost on me.

We are here because Snowdon is launching his book this evening, a history of the anti-smoking movement that has been three-and-a-half years in the making. . . .

Tobacco is also popular with soldiers. Soothing, yet stimulating, it is just the ticket for those faced with the possibility of brutal death and horrifying injury. Snowdon quotes the US general John Pershing, who was asked what was the key to winning the First World War. 'I answer tobacco as much as bullets', he said, before urgently cabling Washington: 'We must have thousands of tons of it without delay.' By one reckoning, 95 per cent of the military used tobacco in some form during the First World War. . . .

While Hill and Doll's conclusions have been confirmed time and again, it is the link between 'passive' smoking and ill-health that has driven the debate in recent years. Anti-tobacco campaigns largely failed to make much headway when they simply called for prohibition or for a smoke-free atmosphere. As long as smoking only involved potential harm to the smoker himself, the irritation felt by some non-smokers was never considered enough to justify intervention and the restriction of people's smoking habits.

Then, changing the focus from harm-to-smokers to the alleged dangers of second-hand smoke for everyone proved crucial in building momentum for a variety of smoking bans. Yet, as Snowdon writes, the evidence of second-hand harm has always been flimsy. . . .

Snowdon is once more in demand and dashes off to sign books. I light up again. Funny how pursuing what should be nothing more than a bad habit can seem like a single, raised finger to those who want to restrict our personal freedom and micromanage our lives.

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• WAXMAN BEATS BIG TOBACCO.  

This weekend I read Waxman's forthcoming legislative memoir (a burgeoning and exciting genre), written with the assistance of Atlantic reporter Joshua Green, The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works. It's a very useful primer on congress and the long battles Waxman has led on behalf of a variety of key progressive causes. You also learn, strangely enough, that Waxman was one of the first members of congress to undertake the now common practice of donating to his colleagues' campaign funds in an effort to keep around representatives he saw as effective and curry favor. For all Waxman's idealism, you can't say he isn't savvy.

Waxman began his attempts to regulate tobacco in the early 1980s, with oversight hearings featuring Captain Kangaroo, and continued his work through then-Representative Dick Durbin's controversial 1987 amendment to ban smoking on airplane flights shorter than two hours, Waxman's own groundbreaking 1994 hearings where tobacco executives lied under oath, Newt Gingrich's torpedoing of a 1998 tobacco regulation compromise, and finally President Bush's threat to veto this bill last July that left it hanging...until today.

It says something about Waxman's tenacity and how political change comes about in the face of entrenched interests that it has taken nearly thirty years to achieve federal regulation

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EXTRA - Velvet Glove, Iron Fist 

Christopher Snowdon's book is now in print.

FORCES readers are familiar with Christopher Snowdon's excellent research which has appeared widely. Chris informs us that his book on the history of anti-smoking, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, will be formally released on 22 June, and is now available (with free worldwide shipping and inscribed by the author on request) by advance order via his website. . . .

Author Christopher Snowdon has given us a sneak preview of his book Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. It's a must-read for all. Mister Snowdon's website has in the past year offered selected chapters for viewing on the internet. These are most intriguing and we can now say that the complete manuscript meets with highest expectations. FORCES recommends Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, now available via advance order from his website, to smokers and non-smokers alike. We are, by now, all affected by the ever-expanding nanny state, internationally at this point.

This is an important book. Privately published offerings such as Michael J. McFadden's Dissecting Antismokers' Brains and Vincent-Riccardo Di Pierri's Rampant Anti-smoking Signifies Grave Danger: Materialism Out of Control have previously provided crucially valuable perspectives, while Jacob Sullum's lauded For Your Own Good: The Anti-smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health warned a wider audience of a growing menace. Snowdon's book, coming five to ten years after these, confirms all their predictions of unceasing regulatory encroachment into the present, while providing historical perspectives on Puritanical and prohibitionist movements of the past, wrapping all into a compelling view of the "anti" hysteria afflicting our times. Popular awareness of this threat, as the burgeoning activism against it chronicled here at FORCES attests, has finally taken root, and now grows exponentially.

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Anti-smoking activism: Puff by puff, inch by inch  

"DON'T forget the cigarettes for Tommy," ran one patriotic British ditty during the first world war. American generals told their government they needed "tobacco as much as bullets"; charities sent cigarettes to the front-line. After the war, non-smokers seemed odd. The crime writer, Agatha Christie, even apologised for not smoking. She had tried many times, she said, but just could not like it.

In this solidly researched, interesting and only occasionally strident book, Christopher Snowdon, an independent researcher, documents the cigarette's journey from patriotic necessity to pariah status. . . .

Once the awful effects of smoking on health became clear, however, smokers could be harassed for their own good. And the notion of passive smoking allowed campaigners to go even further, and seek to stamp out smoking almost everywhere. In America, lawyers got involved. "Flies to honey, vampires to blood--but we've got a glut of lawyers out there just looking for someone to sue," said John Banzhaf, the founder of ASH, an anti-smoking group. The Master Settlement Agreement of 1997, which cost tobacco firms $246 billion, much of it to be spent on anti-smoking measures, meant that after decades of barefaced lying, Big Tobacco found itself outspent and outmanoeuvred. . . .

"No one is seriously talking about a complete ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants," said the director of ASH (UK) in 1998, adding that the suggestion was a "scaremongering story by a tobacco front group." In June 2005 Britain's public-health minister described talk of such a ban as "false speculation". Parliament voted it into law just eight months later. Even then campaigners called for further illiberalism, citing everything from litter to toxins from cigarette butts leaching into groundwater and the harm smoking allegedly does to birds.

Other activists now follow anti-smokers' lead. Flying, drinking bottled water, wearing perfume and burning wood have all been called "the new smoking"; terms like "passive obesity" and "second-hand drinking" do the rounds. "Today it's smoking. Will high-fat foods be next?" asked a tobacco firm in an advertisement in the 1990s. No doubt the ad seemed ridiculously alarmist at the time.

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• Christopher Caldwell - Addicts have made a choice 

We have a justice system that treats drug use as a malevolent act of will (to be punished) and a medical profession that treats it as an unfortunate disease (to be cured). Who is right? In a magnificent new book, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice , Gene M. Heyman, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, argues that it is not his fellow medical professionals.

Addiction is voluntary. The idea that addiction is a “chronic, relapsing brain disease” may be well-meaning but it is false. “Everyone,” Mr Heyman writes, “including those who are called addicts, stops using drugs when the costs of continuing become too great.” We need to make clear, though, what Mr Heyman means by “voluntary”. He does not deny that addiction is an enormous problem that can wreck a life, or several. If you drive drunk or embezzle money to pay for your coke habit when you ought to be studying, the consequences can be permanent and devastating.

But addiction is not the kind of problem that most people think it is. It is not so very far from setting interest rates, devising depreciation schedules and other economic problems of “intertemporal choice”. It involves weighing the value of a current good (intoxication) against the value of various future ones that are shrouded in uncertainty. . . .

The centrepiece of the disease theory of addiction is philosophical, not scientific. It is that nothing that produces sub-optimal outcomes as consistently as addiction does can be freely chosen. “No one chooses to be an addict,” as the saying goes. Mr Heyman shows that this is wrong – or at least that this is the wrong way of getting at the problem.

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• Deep Look: Author's book delves into 'unholy alliance' between Philip Morris, FDA 

Patrick Basham has taken on one of the most intriguing deals in Washington -- how Philip Morris USA came to support Food and Drug Administration oversight -- in a new book titled Butt Out! How Philip Morris Burned Ted Kennedy, the FDA & the Anti-Tobacco Movement.

Basham is a director at the Democracy Institute, a Libertarian public-policy research group in Washington. He is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. . . .

Both Philip Morris and the anti-tobacco groups, mostly prominently the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, have denied those allegations for years. . . .

A. Though the alliance between anti-tobacco activists and the nation's largest tobacco company has been probed by some journalists, the public denials have tended to convince those who have not dug deeply enough. As I provide chapter and verse on how this unholy alliance has developed and worked, perhaps this will galvanize opposition to this travesty of public-health legislation.

Q. What do you think is the biggest revelation to come from your book?

A. That Philip Morris is really smart at pursuing its corporate interest and that Sen. Ted Kennedy, Rep. Henry Waxman, and their anti-tobacco partners are really dumb at pursuing the public's interest.

As I show in my "scorecard of who won and lost," Philip Morris got virtually everything it wanted, while the anti-tobacco leadership in Washington struck out. . . .

Q. What role is there for smokeless tobacco products in society?

A. I'm finishing a second book on the smokeless tobacco issue.

Scientific evidence suggests it can be a very safe and viable alternative for those who need nicotine but don't want the risks associated with smoking.

It's unfortunate that both the federal government and the anti-smoking movement won't provide truthful information to smokers about smokeless products, instead leading smokers to believe that all tobacco products are equally dangerous, which is simply untrue.

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AUDIO: The Leonard Lopate Show: David Sedaris (June 02, 2009) 

David Sedaris on his collection of 22 essays on his favored topics: death, compulsion, unwanted sexual advances and corporal decay. It's called When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

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Books of The Times - 'Lowside of the Road' - A Biography of Tom Waits by Barney Hoskyns  

LOWSIDE OF THE ROAD

A Life of Tom Waits

By Barney Hoskyns

Illustrated. 609 pages. Broadway Books. $29.95. . . .

These days, thanks to Ms. Brennan, Mr. Waits is cleaned up -- he's a father of three -- and has quit smoking, no longer drinks and keeps sane, perky hours.

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Internet Archive Search: tobacco 

Tobacco Talk and Smokers Gossip 

THE present collection of Notes and Anecdotes has been gleaned from the more generally interesting portion of a History of Tobacco, which for some few years has been in progress, and the materials for which were gathered from every available source.

Not only novels and plays, old newspapers, travels and memoirs, have been examined or perused; but the works of poets and satirists, histories, acts of parliament, technical treatises, the accounts of early voyages, collec- tions of tracts and tobacco journals, have been ransacked for contributions on the use and abuse, the praise and blame, of the "plant divine."

For the delectation of all devotees of Tobacco ; for those who take their Latakia from the seductive meerschaum, or Virginia from the clay; for those who taste the " naked beauties " of sweet Havana, as well as those who the " primrose path of dalliance tread " with a cigarette between their teeth ; we have brought together in this little volume droll stories of the pipe, the romantic history of the snuff-box, odds and ends of Tobacco lo^e, and pages of splendid panegyric by nico- tians such as Charles Lamb and Byron, Bulwer and Thackeray.

Here too will be found pleasant gossip about famous tobacco-takers from Raleigh to Tennyson ; not omit- ting the small sins of royalty, the backslidings of bishops (archbishops too) in this respect ; soldiers and doctors, lawyers and artists, poets and peers — every one in short who is an honour to nicotian society, among whom one living lady at least must be numbered — no less exalted a person- age than an Empress !

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Lyra nicotiana: poems and verses concerning tobacco: (1898) 

On a Broken Pipe— James Thomson 241

"And Life is like a Pipe" — Theo. Marzials .... 242

Edifying Reflections of a Smoker— German (Anon.), trans. by Eduard Breck 243

Ode to my Cigar— CAar^es Sprague 245

The Philosophy of Smoke— Pitncft 247

With Pipe and Book— iv/cAorcZ Le GaUienne . . . 249

The Happy Smoking Ground— ii/c7(ard Le GaUienne . . 250

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