Not Just Tobacco: Health Scares, Medical Paternalism and Individual Liberty (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781537250496)

Every week, the headlines announce a new danger. Tobacco, alcohol, sugar, red meat, coffee, mobile telephones, video games - all are said to be killing us, corrupting our children, or destroying the National Health Service. From these scares come calls for new taxes, new bans, and ever more supervision of how we live.

The late Chris R. Tame saw this coming long before it became routine. Founder of the Libertarian Alliance and Director of FOREST (the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco), he spent his life defending the right of adults to make their own choices. In this book he pulls the camera back from the "war on tobacco" and places it inside a much wider campaign to regulate private life in the name of health.

Drawing on examples from Britain and beyond, Tame shows:

• how modern pressure groups manufacture health panics and feed them to a compliant media

• how statistics are massaged, misreported and turned into weaponised "junk science"

• how a new class of professional activists, medics and bureaucrats uses fear to increase its own power and income

• how businesses, far from resisting, usually appease or collaborate with their would-be regulators

• how the cumulative effect is a creeping system of "health fascism" in which almost any pleasure can be portrayed as a social threat.

The chapters range widely. Tobacco is only the starting point. Tame dissects food scares from cholesterol to sugar and salt; crusades against alcohol and gambling; attacks on sports such as boxing; and a parade of often forgotten panics about fragrances, video games, breast implants, "electro-magnetic radiation" and more. In each case he asks the same questions: Who benefits? Who pays? Who loses freedom?

A substantial final section develops a systematic libertarian critique of health paternalism. Tame exposes the religious mindset behind the cult of "Health", the corruption of science by grant-seeking and ideology, and the willingness of politicians to govern through fear rather than consent. Written in clear, vigorous prose, his arguments remain strikingly relevant in an age of sugar taxes, lifestyle regulation and permanent public-health emergencies.

This edition includes:

• a new Preface by Sean Gabb (2016) setting the book in the context of later developments in public-health policy

• full notes and references for readers who wish to follow up the empirical claims.

Not Just Tobacco is essential reading for libertarians, smokers' rights supporters, sceptics of "nanny state" politics, and anyone who suspects that today's health scares are about power at least as much as they are about health.