K-Dog–yeah smoking gets the nanny nazis going doesn’t it? My very first LRC column, Let Kids Smoke, drew more hate mail than any since, even the ones advocating relocating Israel to Utah or praising the Kelo eminent domain decision.

The Best of Stephan Kinsella

I dislike smoking. I think it’s trashy. I smoked the entire summer I was 13, behind the school, and never took it up again after that. However, this is the kind of thing that could make me want to smoke. You must see Robert Proctor’s work on this topic. Many people may regard the anti-smoking wars as unimportant, and even accuse one of hyperbole when using the term “Nazi.” But really? In Nazi Germany, there was a Reich Health Führer, a Bureau Against the Dangers of Alcohol and Tobacco, the Reich Committee for the Struggle against Addictive Drugs, the German Anti-tobacco League, the Scientific Institute for the Research into the Hazards of Tobacco, and myriad other organizations dedicated to purging “bad habits” in the name of lifestyle “purity.” Robert Proctor notes:

The Nazis had a powerful anti-tobacco movement, arguably the most powerful in the world at that time. Tobacco was opposed by racial hygienists fearing the corruption of the German “germ plasm” (i.e., genetic material), by industrial hygienists fearing a reduction of people’s capacity to work, by nurses and midwives fearing harm to the “maternal organism.” Tobacco was said to be a “corrupting force in a rotting civilization that has become lazy.” The Nazis’ anti-tobacco rhetoric drew from an earlier generation’s eugenics rhetoric and also reflected an ethic of bodily purity and zeal for work. Tobacco use was attacked as an “epidemic,” a “plague,” as “dry drunkenness,” and as “lung masturbation”; tobacco and alcohol abuses were “diseases of civilization” and “relics of a liberal lifestyle.”

Don’t miss anarcho-libertarian Pierre Lemieux’s great piece on Proctor’s book The Nazi War on Cancer and Mark Thornton’s 1995 Free Market article “Are Cigarettes Doomed?”

According to Tobacco.org, in spite of the demonization of tobacco, in 1936 “German cigarette manufacturer CIGARETTEN BILDENDIENST offered coupons in cigarette packs which are redeemable for a coffee-table book on Hitler. More coupons bought “home album” pictures suitable for pasting into designated spots. Goebbels oversaw production of the book.”

The Best of Karen De Coster