For Your Own Good

The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health

Jacob Sullum (View Bio)
Hardcover: The Free Press, 1998; Paperback: Touchstone, 1999.

"Sullum is meticulously logical, and his conclusions are implicit in everything he argues. [I]t is to Sullum's considerable credit that he has made us even think about totalitarianism in this most unlikely context." — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"Jacob Sullum, in a compelling new book, ...sees the proposed [tobacco] legislation as a decisive infringement on the right to smoke and a vast extension of what he calls 'the public health movement,' which seeks to regulate our pleasures and legislate our risk-taking down to the smallest details of what we ingest or enjoy. Whatever you may feel about smoking, you can't help being chilled by the implications of this newly triumphant public health philosophy." — Richard Klein, The Wall Street Journal

"FOR YOUR OWN GOOD is one breath of fresh air that the anti-tobacco puritans will hate. Jacob Sullum has written a lucid and mordant expose of their neurotic agenda that is sure to make him the hero of smokers and our liberty-loving allies. I'd walk a mile for this book." — Florence King, National Review

"Entertaining and provocative." — Andrew Stuttaford, National Review

"Anti-smoking hysteria is more than repugnant, it is false. In FOR YOUR OWN GOOD a lucid and superbly researched new book on the anti-tobacco jihad, journalist Jacob Sullum pinpoints the deceit." — Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe

"A superb new book by Jacob Sullum, who dispassionately demolishes anti-smoking arguments (including the one on addiction)." — James K. Glassman, The New York Post

"A readable, well-reported account of the near-triumph of anti-smoking zealots in America....The evidence in Sullum's book proves beyond a reasonable doubt that anti-smoking elitists want to destroy the tobacco industry and prevent as many people from smoking as possible through the coercive power of government.... After reading FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, I'm all the more fearful we're on a slippery slope toward more government intrusion." — Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard

"A curious and challenging mixture of fact and philosophy is what makes this book so intriguing and worthwhile. Sullum marshals an impressive array of facts and arguments in tackling such fundamental issues as addiction, the risk of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, the legitimacy of taxing cigarettes, and the effects of advertising.... Sullum is a thoughtful and remarkably articulate proponent of a position it behooves all members of the health care professions to understand and contemplate." — New England Journal of Medicine