Up in Smoke: From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Up in Smoke: From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics

In a landmark report by the U.S. Surgeon General in 1964, the government warned its citizens of the adverse effects of smoking on their health and took a series of steps to discourage smoking. These steps stemmed from “ordinary politics” –that is, actions taken or authorized by legislatures. 1994 heralded a new era in tobacco politics: of “adversarial legalism,” wherein state attorneys general sued leading cigarette manufacturers for the harm they had done to public health. These law-suits culminated in the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) that directed an estimated $250 billion to state governments over the next 25 years and imposed new marketing and advertising restrictions.

In her second edition, Martha Derthick introduces new evidence from 5 years of experience under the MSA to show that the states were more interested in raising revenue than in improving tobacco control, that the enrichment of wealthy tort lawyers violated the legal profession's ethics, and that the agreement, ironically, spawned the rise of small, upstart cigarette manufacturers able to undersell the major companies. In this clearly written, fast-paced case study, Derthick concludes that the tobacco lawsuits not only produced flawed public policy that flouted the American system of checks and balances, but has done little to improve or better safeguard public health.

Martha Derthick retired in 1999 from the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, where she was the Julia Allen Cooper Professor. She is the author of numerous books on American government, including: Dilemmas of Scale in America′s Federal Democracy (editor, 1999) ; Agency Under Stress: The Social Security Administration in American Government (1990); The Politics of Deregulation (with Paul J. Quirk, 1985); and Policymaking for Social Security (1979), which won the Kammerer Prize of the American Political Science Association as the best book of the year on American public policy. Before going to the University of Virginia, she was for twelve years a member of the Governmental Studies Program of The Brookings Institution, and was the program′s director between 1978 and 1983. She has also taught at Dartmouth College, Stanford University, Harvard University, and Boston College.