Book Review: Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris

Abstract

Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America's Romance with Illegal Drugs, by Jill Jonnes (New York: Scribner, 1996), 510 pp., $30.00 (cloth only). Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, by Richard Kluger (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), xix + 807 pp., $35.00 (cloth only). The social and political history of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use began to take shape as a distinct field in the 1960s, gained momentum in the 1970s, and fairly exploded in the 1980s and 1990s. At first, important books in the field bore the imprint of and analytical style associated with academic presses. In recent years, however, more work has appeared in trade-book form. Jill Jonnes's Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams and Richard Kluger's Ashes to Ashes fall into this category. Though Jonnes's subject is illicit drugs and Kluger's is cigarettes, the two books have much in common: commercial publishers, colorful sidelights, wide-ranging research, and Robert Caro-class heft. Between them they total over 1,300 pages. Neither Kluger nor Jonnes (pronounced Jones) was originally trained as a historian. Kluger was a journalist, editor, and novelist before publishing, in 1976, his highly regarded Simple Justice: A History of Brown v. Board of Education. Jonnes, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, worked for many years as a reporter and free-lance writer before enrolling in the Johns Hopkins doctoral program in history. Hep-Cats is a revised version of her 1992 dissertation, buffed and expanded. A small interest to declare: I corresponded with Jonnes while she was revising. I will therefore not critically evaluate the book, though I do want to call attention to what is new, interesting, and controversial about it. Hep-Cats is keyed to America's four major drug epidemics. The first of these involved opiate and cocaine use in the late l9th and early 20th centuries and subsided, Jonnes argues, when U.S. laws and international diplomatic pressure succeeded in restricting supplies and stigmatizing drug use, which fell to an all-time low during World War II. Then heroin made a comeback in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly among black urban hepsters and their disciples. White boomers got into the act in the 1960s and early 1970s, although they were more inclined to use marijuana and LSD than heroin, still essentially, if no longer exclusively, a ghetto drug. In the 1970s white youths also began experimenting with cocaine, the drug at the heart of the fourth epidemic. Sniffing gave way to freebasing, which, in the mid-1980s; gave way to crack smoking: from gilded drug to ghetto drug in ten years flat. If Jonnes's chronology is traditional, her theme-and this is very much a theme-driven book-is anything but. Jonnes is a disillusioned liberal, angry about the human toll of drug addiction and more than willing to name names and assign blame. Jonnes argues that the historical thrust of U.S. policy was sound: the government needed to crack down on drugs (but not on alcohol, which she says is less dangerous because less radically reinforcing). More inclined than most historians to emphasize the instrumental over the symbolic ends of narcotic laws, Jonnes insists that drugs were intrinsically seductive commodities that needed to be tightly controlled, never mind the racial fears and class anxieties they generated. The control effort was a success. Early-20th-century legislation, which punished and stigmatized nonmedical drug use, together with the fact that many Americans had seen firsthand what drugs could do, substantially reduced the incidence of opiate and cocaine addiction. Though traffickers like Arnold Rothstein and Jack Legs Diamond managed to divert supplies from European pharmaceutical houses in the 1920s, American diplomatic pressure and League of Nations agreements in the early 1930s managed to stanch the flow. …