Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Regulation
Publication Date
Winter 2002
Page Number
58
Keywords
smoking, health risk, tobacco products, public policy
Disciplines
Health Law and Policy | Law
Abstract
Smoking is by far the largest single risk that most people take. Perhaps in part because of that prominence, smoking has been the target of a wide variety of regulations and legal actions. The controversy over tobacco products is at least four centuries old, but it has been largely over the past half-century that the diverse wave of public policy initiatives against tobacco products has emerged. Within a standard economic framework of consumer choice, there would seem to be little impetus for broadly based government efforts to discourage smoking. The risks of smoking are largely borne by the consumers who choose those products. To the extent that smoking harms others, the externalities can often be addressed through focused policy measures such as non-smoking areas. Over the past decade, cigarettes have been under increasing assault on two fronts. First, there have been claims that the underlying rationality of smoking decisions is in doubt and that smokers need to be protected from themselves. Second, policy concerns over exposures to tobacco smoke escalated as government agencies suggested that smoking does in fact impose considerable health harms on others.
Recommended Citation
W. Kip Viscusi,
The New Cigarette Paternalism, 25 Regulation. 58
(2002)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/1584