As Ja$on points out in the comments of an earlier post, it seems our Smoking is Healthier than Fascism crashes earlier this month upset a blogger in Canada (Canadian bloggers being well known for their tendency to, when upset, type harder).  I won’t delve too much into the substance of the post, but I would like to clear up the factual inaccuracies:

1. Washington, DC is not the “heart of America.”  It’s more like the appendix of America, largely useless but prone to trouble-making.
2. Our shirts were definitely fluorescent by any stretch of the imagination.  In Crayola terms, I’d call them cornflower.
3. We weren’t carrying signs or placards of any sort.  And if we had, they wouldn’t have said “Fascism is worse than tobacco.”  That doesn’t even flow well!
4. To the best of my knowledge, none of us argued the hypocrisy of allowing and regulating cigarette manufacturing and then legislating away the right to do it.  We certainly weren’t there to legitimize the tobacco industry, nor were we sent by them.
5. We were not “invited to participate in the conference,” nor did we decline any such invitation.  I don’t see much use in joining a conference of activists.  I did, however, attend an actual scientific conference on tobacco and harm reduction strategies at the NIH a couple of weeks ago.  I took copious notes and am quite convinced that health activists who insist on “the elimination of death and disease due to tobacco use”—rather than on harm reduction strategies that could significantly reduce death and disease—are doing a great disservice to the people they’re purportedly trying to help.
6. We didn’t disband “moments later” for any reason other than that our crash was scheduled to run from 12:00 – 1:30 pm.  Actually, we stayed until nearly 2:00pm.  Then we “disbanded” off to lunch together.  I had a crab cake sandwich.  It was delicious.
7. We were concerned neither with the substance of the conference (which a quick glance at the conference program demonstrates was clearly geared towards activists, not academics) nor a photo-op (although I myself am an avowed media whore).  The singular mission was to bug people and perhaps inspire some angry Canadian blogging.  Mission. Totally. Accomplished.
8. I can’t speak for the other crashers present, but I, for one, am wholly in favor exposing fraud where it exists.  It certainly has existed in the tobacco industry, but I question its continued existence.  Punishing fraud is certainly important for the operation of a market economy.  What I don’t support is treating companies like criminals for marketing and selling their products, so long as it isn’t done on a fraudulent basis.  There are a lot of products whose intended use creates the possibility of harm.  As long as no one lies to me about those possibilities, I’m pretty happy.  (I don’t even particularly mind warning labels, which I think were a fairly reasonable intervention designed to both resolve problems of asymmetrical information between tobacco companies and consumers and to limit producer liability.)

 Overall, I think it’s specious to frame tobacco control as an issue of “public” health.  Insomuch as information about the dangers of tobacco is no longer asymmetrical, this seems to be the exact definition of a problem of “private” health: people making private decisions with others disagree.  Me, I play tennis a few times a week, eat reasonably well, brush my teeth, take my vitamins, stretch before running, and go to the doctor when something hurts.  Those are my private health decisions.  I also smoke, and that’s a private decision too. 

Public health problems would include things like lead in the water; the spread of infectious disease; mosquitoes with West Nile—prevention of those problems is a public good in the true economic sense of the term, in that the health benefits are non-excludable.  Smoking is a “public” health issue only in the same bastardized way that bars and restaurants are “public” places: both are gross distortions of the true meaning of the word.