Sarah Milov’s The Cigarette: A Political History is accurately subtitled. Milov, a history professor at the University of Virginia, has written a first-rate history of the interaction between tobacco companies, tobacco growers, and various levels of government over almost a century. She delves carefully into the details of those interactions and tells you more than you probably want to know about the many decades of interaction.

The history itself is fascinating, whether it be about the federal government’s attempt to cartelize tobacco growers early in the 20th century to give them more power in their dealings with cigarette manufacturers, the federal government’s promotion of cigarettes to troops during World War II, the many years it took for governments to ban cigarettes from workplaces, or the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) under which tobacco companies agreed to fork over hundreds of billions of dollars to state governments. Unfortunately, Milov misses the significance of some early moves the cigarette companies themselves made to publicize the hazards of their competitors’ cigarettes. And, possibly because she likes the result, she doesn’t fully appreciate the significance of the tobacco company cartel formed by the MSA.

While she makes her own dislike of cigarette smoking clear, that interferes only occasionally with her narrative. She appears to be an honest broker. In that vein, I note that though I am a militant anti-smoker, I strongly support the rights of smokers and tobacco companies, and I did once consult with a law firm that defends tobacco companies.

Defenders and critics / Milov does show some of the biases that are typical of left-wing historians. For example, she refers to those who defend the rights of tobacco companies as “pro-corporate” rather than “pro-market”; some of those defenders are pro-corporate, but some are pro-market and would not defend corporations when they seek special privileges. The good news is that in many ways Milov tries to tell a straight story and most of the time she does not shade the evidence.

It is common for analysts who oppose a particular program or industry to accept all criticisms of the industry even when the criticisms are weak or off-target. Milov’s work is refreshingly free of that problem. She even makes gentle fun of her fellow tobacco critics when they overstep. A case in point is her discussion of anti-smoking activist John Banzhaf of George Washington University Law School. About his 1969 petition to separate smokers and nonsmokers on flights, she writes, “Following a time-honored pattern of framing children as the primary beneficiary of government protections, Banzhaf’s petition also observed that large numbers of American children suffered from asthma.” She later refers to his petition as “an invitation to imagine turbulent skies indeed: cardiac arrests, wheezing children, and emotional tantrums by frazzled passengers pushed over the edge by the smoker across the aisle.” She also doesn’t hesitate to note that in a Chicago “smoker’s court” that was established to hear cases of people who illegally smoked on government transportation, only two of the 50 cases heard by a judge involved white defendants.

Safer cigarettes? / At times, possibly because of her ideology but more likely because she’s an historian and not an economist, Milov misses some of the ways that tobacco companies themselves reduced smoking by advertising the nasty health consequences of smoking. She notes that in 1953, tobacco executives “agreed to set aside the temptation to exploit the health issue against rival firms.” Maybe so, but the more important fact, which she doesn’t mention, is that they didn’t stick to that agreement.

In a 1985 report for the Federal Trade Commission, economist Jack Calfee laid out the history of cigarette companies’ advertising some of the bad health consequences of smoking. In 1952, he noted, Lorillard, with only 6% of the market, introduced the Kent brand, whose “Micronite” filter reduced the amount of tar and nicotine. Kent’s ads noted that “the difference in protection is priceless.” But protection from what? Smokers understood from what. Not for nothing were cigarettes at the time widely referred to as “cancer sticks” and “coffin nails.” Interestingly, per-capita sales of cigarettes in the United States, which had risen every year since 1931, fell by 2.8% in 1953 and another 6.1% in 1954. By the end of 1954, the market share of filtered cigarettes was more than 10%, up from under 2% in 1950. Calfee’s FTC report notes that Brown & Williamson, the only company that concentrated on filter brands, was also the only one to gain sales in 1954. The two largest cigarette makers, American Tobacco and RJ Reynolds, avoided “fear advertising” but did respond competitively by introducing filtered brands. As I noted in a July 1997 Fortune article titled “Joe Camel: Brought to You by the FTC,” the “big winner in all this was the consumer, who was told nightly on TV, courtesy of the smaller cigarette companies, that smoking could be harmful.”

For a long time, the FTC was unconvinced that there was any scientific evidence that smoking was harmful. It stepped into the controversy in 1955, publishing rules that prohibited references in cigarette advertising to the “throat, larynx, lungs, nose, or other parts of the body” or to “digestion, energy, nerves, or doctors.” What kind of advertising did the FTC explicitly allow? Advertising about taste and pleasure.

Health-related advertising of cigarettes had one last gasp, so to speak, in the late 1950s. Some medical experts started claiming that reducing the tar content of cigarettes would reduce the risk of lung cancer. That set off the great “tar derby.” Cigarette companies reduced tar and nicotine content and advertised that fact. Calfee notes that between the middle of 1957 and the end of 1959, tar and nicotine levels dropped by nearly 40%. Can you guess what happened next? In 1960, the FTC ruled that because claims about tar were health claims, they could not be made unless substantiated by epidemiological evidence. Thus ended the economic rationale for making cigarettes safer.

Unfortunately, Milov misses all of this.

Also, she uncritically accepts the idea that secondhand smoke is an externality. To be fair, she shares that confusion with many economists, but it’s not necessarily an externality. The clearest case where it is an externality is when someone smoking outdoors on government property exhales smoke that is ingested by someone else. But when smoking occurs in restaurants and bars, private property rights solve the problem: the establishment can decide whether to allow, prohibit, or have a special area for smoking. Absent government intervention, the owner has both an incentive and the power to take account of the damage so that there is no externality. I made this point in a September 2007 Econ Journal Watch article titled “Smoking in Restaurants: Who Best to Set the House Rules?”

The MSA / To her credit, Milov doesn’t miss all the economics. In particular, she is on target when she correctly refers to the euphemistically labeled “supply management” of tobacco as what it really is: a cartel.

One development in her century-long history to which Milov gives too little attention is the 1998 MSA, whereby four major cigarette companies agreed to pay restitution to U.S. state governments for Medicaid expenditures those governments made for the medical treatment of smokers. She mentions but misses the elephant in the room: the agreement created—with the blessing of state attorneys general and the federal government—a cartel to raise the price of cigarettes so that the main payers of that restitution aren’t tobacco companies or their shareholders, but current smokers. Walter Olson, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, described this in a January 2000 Reason article titled “Puff, the Magic Settlement.”

In a 1998 study published by the Brookings Institution, Stanford economist Jeremy Bulow and Nuffield College economist Paul Klemperer laid out in more detail the cartel aspects of the settlement. I should note that, in my view, it was unjust for tobacco companies to pay for expenses that the state governments, by joining Medicaid, voluntarily accepted, but it was also unjust to shift those costs onto the smokers themselves.

Having said all that, I should note that I personally benefit from the government crackdown on cigarettes. I had some health problems at age 16 because of my father’s smoking cigars. My doctor at the time told me never to take up smoking. I didn’t. I didn’t realize just how much I had gained from smoke-free restaurants in California, starting in 1995, until I entered the nonsmoking section of a restaurant in Amsterdam in 1999 and had to leave immediately because of the smoke.

Conclusion / When I saw the positive blurb on Milov’s back cover by Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, I wondered “Uh-oh, is this book going to be as badly researched and as prejudiced as MacLean’s hatchet job on James Buchanan?” (See “Buchanan the Evil Genius,” Fall 2017.) Fortunately, the answer is no. When it comes to history, Milov is old-school. She carefully went through boxes of documents to tell an interesting and well-sourced tale. Her own biases against cigarettes are on display, but they are no worse than the usual biases that historians—and most academics—bring to their work. What would have made the book substantially better is if she had paid more attention to the economics literature.