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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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