"Who Needs a Public Health System When Sickness Is a Personal Failure?"

"In the workplace, the anti-smoking movement had a stronger card to play: the 'social cost' of smoking, which activists learned to quantify. The key moment was a lawsuit brought by a telephone company employee called Donna Shimp, who suffered from headaches and rashes in the smoky office where she worked for New Jersey Bell. In 1975, Shimp sued for a smoke-free workplace on the basis of her rights as a non-smoker, but she also stressed the 'cost factors' of workplace smoking. If New Jersey Bell would not act on behalf of non-smokers, it might act on behalf of its bottom line–as indeed it did. Shimp and the group she founded, Environmental Improvement Associates, gestured towards the health hazards of inhaling second-hand smoke, which researchers were beginning to discern, but her argument boiled down to the claim that 'smoking–and quite often, smokers–cost too much.' This chimed with a new wave of management consultancy that dedicated itself to a leaner, meaner, cleaner workplace."

Jackson Lears at the London Review of Books reviews Sarah Milov's The Cigarette: A Political History.