My plan to write a novel about the tobacco industry almost ended before it began. After a week of research, I'd read countless books, studies, and articles but had little more than a headache to show for it. What had at first looked like a sea of well-documented information turned out to be a swamp of propaganda. Frustrated, I dragged a garbage can in from the garage and began trashing everything that seemed too smooth, too hysterical, or too obvious in its agenda. The following books and links are what was left. Ashes to Ashes, by Richard Kluger, is a brilliant and exhaustively comprehensive history of the tobacco industry in America. Despite the somewhat inflammatory extended title, this Pulitzer Prize winner is fairly balanced in its reporting. It's also strangely riveting, despite its considerable length. If you truly want to understand tobacco, this is the only place to start. Regulating Tobacco, edited by Robert Rabin and Stephen Sugarman is a collection of essays discussing pretty much all aspects of tobacco policy. Some essays are better than others but all appear well researched and more or less propaganda free. Rabin's essay is the only clear explanation of the history of tobacco litigation I've ever seen and alone is worth twice the price of the book. Smoked, by Mike Males, is essentially an indictment of the anti-smoking lobby, which Males portrays as hopelessly inept and politicized. Some of the attacks are pretty rabid, but most seem reasonably well supported. A great piece of outside-the-box thinking that significantly influenced my writing. Reducing Tobacco Use: A Report from the Surgeon General. A beautiful piece of government mumbo-jumbo quoted by one of the characters in Smoke Screen. If these are the people on the front lines in the battle against smoking, the tobacco industry has nothing to worry about. You can find it here: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/sgr_2000/sgr_tobacco_aag.htm This is a fairly comprehensive resource for news articles on the tobacco industry. A good place to go if you're trying to find information on a specific incident or lawsuit. www.tobacco.org Serious about your research? This is a database of tobacco industry documents. www.tobaccodocuments.org An American Epidemic: Diabetes. This is the article quoted by my character Trevor in one of his television appearances. It was in the September 4, 2000 Newsweek and is interesting reading from the standpoint of comparing junk food to tobacco. Newsweek.com won't give it to you for free, so you may want to try your local library. The cost of smoking has been the subject of a lot of debate. Are non-smokers really forced to subsidize the healthcare costs of smokers? The answer seems to be no. In fact, it may be that by dying younger, smokers may actually subsidize non-smokers. For an entertaining and enlightening article on this subject, take a look at Pierre Lemieux's article The Economics of Smoking at http://www.econlib.org/library/features/feature5.html. If you want to dig into something more comprehensive and technical, get the book Smoking and the State by Robert Tollison and Richard Wagner. If you actually have an economics degree, you can buy Kip Viscusi's paper Cigarette Taxation and the Social Consequences of Smoking for $5 at http://www.nber.org/papers/w4891 I'd love to have included a link to some information on the very interesting subject of second-hand smoke, but wasn't able to find anything I felt was sufficiently unbiased. The World Health Organization seems to have determined that Environmental Tobacco Smoke isn't all that dangerous but tends to present this conclusion in the most alarmist terms possible. The EPA study may be even worse and was criticized by a U.S. district court judge for "adopt[ing] a methodology for each chapter, without explanation, based on the outcome sought in that chapter." If you know of a balanced summary of the dangers of ETS, shoot me an email and I'll add it to this list.