We are pro-smoking here at The Scrapbook. We do not smoke ourselves, and to be honest the smell of stale cigarette smoke makes us gag, but we viscerally disapprove of the way in which nicotine users have been browbeaten, shamed, and hounded out of polite society over the last several decades.
James Madison’s Lesson on Free Speech. Over at National Review, our own Jay Cost has a look back at James Madison, free speech, and the times in which we find ourselves with antifa and the alt-right running around. Here's Cost: "None of this means that we should excuse the boorish and ignorant…
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When you travel to a country like France, Spain, or South Korea, you notice something about the lifestyles of the professional classes there: Unlike in America, they still smoke cigarettes. The U.S.'s lawyers, professors, and bankers, meanwhile, long ago gave up the devil's weed.
When former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg banned smoking in public parks, it made logical sense from a certain autocratic urban-beautification standpoint. Who wants tobacco smoke stinking up their stroll along the Lilac Walk? I grumbled at the time, but the prohibition, which was followed…
Last Friday the FDA decided to remove the black box warning it places on the smoking cessation drug Chantix. That the black box itself existed was a source of great frustration to me, because it represented the triumph of narrative over rational economic analysis. A few compelling stories,…
The 15 percent of American adults who still smoke cigarettes despite the well-known damage to their lungs, throats and lifespans are, it's fairly safe to assume, the stubbornest brand loyalists alive. And yet Philip Morris International (PMI), the maker of Marlboro, claims it's their new corporate…
On Wednesday, a different Castro was in the news: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro decreed that all 3,100 local Public Housing Agencies must implement "smoke-free" policies for all indoor dwellings within the next 18 months. In essence, by late 2018, smoking…
Smoking rates have fallen appreciably in the last decade, driven by sharply higher cigarette taxes, public smoking bans, and changing mores that have made the activity basically unacceptable in many social circles.
A class action lawsuit against the Motion Picture Association of America—claiming "tobacco imagery" in Hollywood movies brainwashes our youth—would have every film with as much as puff receive an R rating.
Sometime in the next two years, if Obama administration bureaucrats get their way, public housing tenants who smoke in their own apartments will face sanctions, fines and perhaps even eviction. The proposed policy is deeply flawed. However, those who oppose it—as many conservatives will…
As electronic cigarettes have proliferated and spawned a sub-culture of their own—vape shops, chai-latte flavored vaping fluid and even the “sport” of cloud chasing—few policies have seemed as intuitive as stopping children under 18 from buying them. As almost all e-cigarettes contain nicotine,…
In at least one respect, visiting China is a little bit like traveling back in time to America in, say, 1957. (Or so I gather.) That is, people routinely smoke cigarettes in shopping malls, elevators, lines, apartment building hallways, schools, and yes, even hospitals. (Oh, and of course bars and…
The crusade against public tobacco use has long been predicated on protecting people from “secondhand smoke.” Sparing non-smokers from tobacco fiends’ cariogenic emissions was the logic that compelled cities from Paris to New York to even Richmond, Virginia (home of Phillip Morris!) to kick smokers…
Not The Onion:
Undoubtedly much to the chagrin of the former mayor, more New Yorkers are smoking these days. According to the latest data from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, adult smoking rates in New York City have risen to 16 percent, from an all-time low of 14 percent in 2010.
New York enjoyed a mid-season subway series last week with four games between the Mets and Yankees. Seeing the two teams play every year instead of once in a generation is one of the upsides of Major League Baseball’s recent experiment in inter-league play. But for the hometown TV audience, it…
A study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that "[m]arijuana use makes tobacco use more pleasurable and may increase the user’s risk for becoming addicted to nicotine." Experiments involving rats found that those animals exposed to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana,…
The Department of Defense (DOD) has just announced that the public will be invited to vote in a video competition called "Fight the Enemy." In this case, the enemy is tobacco. The innovation office of the military's assistant secretary of defense for health affairs is sponsoring the competition…
As Colorado’s new law permitting—encouraging?—the recreational use of marijuana went into effect, many of our country’s finest journalists felt the need to share the details of their experience with the ganja. Some came to celebrate the state’s new liberality, others to condemn it.
I'm sitting at my desk, looking at a photograph of a gangrenous foot. It is a bloated thing in hues of phlegmatic gray rot, sanguine inflammation, melancholic black bile, and choleric open sores—exhibiting all the humors of a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Above the…
In a routine, short-run economic downturn, people tend to adopt more healthy behaviors. You quit smoking and cut back on the drinking because … well, maybe to save money and maybe because you tend to focus more on the essentials and live less indulgently. But our current long, lingering economic…
The federal government will now allow companies that sell "nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products," such as Nicorette, not to put warning labels on their merchandise, the Food and Drug Administration announced. The change, the FDA now admits, is because the warnings, which were mandated for…
One would not expect that college campuses would go out of their way to accommodate the habits of the Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner. But how respectful are colleges of the current occupant of the White House? Not very, it would seem.