Firebrand: A Tobacco Lawyer's Journey - Hardcover

Knelman, Joshua

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0735243816 ISBN 13: 9780735243811

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2022

Synopsis

"You’ll inhale this tell-all book about the tobacco industry and never look at a No Smoking sign the same way again!"
—Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

Mad Men meets Bad Blood in this addictive, behind-the-scenes globe-trotting narrative of moral ambiguity, law, public policy, and big tobacco.

“Given everything the lawyer knew up to that point about smoking, as far as he could tell, cigarettes shouldn’t even have been available as a mass market product...”

It’s the start of the new millennium and a young lawyer is recruited to work for an unnamed multinational company. It isn’t until his second interview that the product the company produces is revealed to him: cigarettes. Possibly the most controversial consumer product in human history: seductive, addictive, and deadly—yet completely legal. Over the next decade, he travels the world as he works as legal counsel to help successfully market cigarettes in dozens of countries.
 
Firebrand ventures into the heart of the tobacco industry and the icy paradoxes of capitalism, each chapter a counterintuitive lesson on how cigarette companies—the target of increasingly intense anti-smoking campaigns and government regulations, including the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report and 200-billion-dollar debt of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement—continue to pivot and thrive in the 21st century, inhaling profits from their one billion smokers worldwide.
 
As Mad Men did for the alcohol-fueled, oversexed, corrupt world of New York advertising, Firebrand does for the even more despised world of big tobacco, in an addictive, behind-the-scenes piece of storytelling. The lawyer’s work takes him from manufacturing factories to hocking “sticks” at UK corner store counters; from tacky resorts in Spain and pirate city-states to luxury hotels and Grand Prix events across European and Asian cities. A contemporary tale of our ambiguous times, told with character-based drive and dry humour, Firebrand is a grand tour of the compelling paradoxes of globalization and corporate culture, shrink-wrapped in an engrossing narrative of a morally dubious yet completely legal enterprise.

“This is storytelling at its best. Wry observation, compelling narrative, fascinating characters, page-turning writing, and an age-old question driving it all...”
—Joel Bakan, author of The New Corporation: How ‘Good’ Corporations are Bad for Democracy

About this title

About the Author

JOSHUA KNELMAN is an award-winning author, a founding member of The Walrus magazine, and the recipient of multiple National Magazine Awards. His writing has appeared in The Walrus, Toronto Life, National Post, and The Globe and Mail. His debut true crime bestseller, Hot Art, earned the Crime Writers of Canada Best Non-Fiction Book Award and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. He lives in Toronto.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The lawyer started his job in the tobacco industry in the late summer of 2001, just three years after the Master Settlement Agreement was signed in the US, and as waves from the surgeon general’s report continued to roll outward — changing social attitudes and laws in almost every nation on Earth — they gathered in strength and were finally crashing on the shores of Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and the United Kingdom.

The lawyer’s new job was to help the company navigate those fast-moving legal waters, making sure its marketing and ad campaigns were complying in full with the new laws and restrictions descending on the UK marketplace — all while selling as many cigarettes as possible.

It was an exciting time to be joining the industry. No other consumer product was quite like cigarettes. The fact that cigarettes were still 100 percent legal while at the same time proven to be deadly had created a kind of paradox which swirled mysteriously at the centre of this special product’s popularity.

As far as the lawyer could tell, given everything he knew about smoking, cigarettes shouldn’t even have been available as a mass market product. Capitalism, it seemed, hadn’t been designed to contain this particular consumer anomaly.

It had been decades since Richard Doll, and then the surgeon general, had found cigarettes to be poisonous. Yet here he was, a young lawyer, joining a corporate multinational company which manufactured and sold this product around the globe. Even more absurd, he was a smoker. He was sailing full speed into the tobacco paradox, not sure what to expect.

Edition details

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0735243816
• ISBN 13: 9780735243811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272