BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Anti-Smoking Zeal Is Hazardous to Your Freedom

FOR YOUR OWN GOOD

The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health

By Jacob Sullum

Illustrated. 338 pages. The Free Press. $25.

The most efficient way to read Jacob Sullum's finely reasoned attack, ''For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health,'' is to start at the end. There you'll find an appendix listing Mr. Sullum's most salient points, which are summarized as what he calls ''10 myths of the anti-smoking movement.''

These range from ''1. The tobacco companies hid the truth about the hazards and addictiveness of cigarettes from the American public,'' to ''3. People smoke because of advertising,'' to ''5. Secondhand smoke poses a grave threat to bystanders,'' to ''10. Once people have started smoking, nicotine addiction prevents them from stopping.''

Then if you turn to the beginning of Mr. Sullum's final chapter, you find in an epigraph quoting H. L. Mencken's ''Prejudices'' the following sentences, which amount to the crux of ''For Your Own Good'': ''The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.''

Together, the list of so-called myths and the Mencken quotation succinctly summarize the basic argument of Mr. Sullum's book. This is that in their zeal to stamp out the use of tobacco in the United States, anti-smokers have imposed an ideal of public health that not only excludes disease or infirmity but also includes ''complete physical, mental and social well-being.'' To support this crusade, Mr. Sullum argues, they have made the claims he characterizes as myths, which because of their speciousness add up to the message ''You shouldn't smoke because it's bad for you.'' He concludes, ''A government empowered to maximize health is a totalitarian government.''

Now, the reason for starting at the end of ''For Your Own Good'' is not that its author is in any way evasive in the earlier part of his book. A senior editor at Reason magazine and a syndicated columnist, Mr. Sullum is meticulously logical, and his conclusions are implicit in everything he argues. The trouble is that he's so careful to be fair and balanced that you sometimes lose track of exactly what he's driving at.

For instance, he emphasizes at length how harmful cigarettes are to one's health, listing lung cancer, coronary occlusion and the many other diseases that are almost certainly caused by smoking. Only in this context does he make the point that as far as the cost of smoking imposed on society is concerned, ''smokers consume less health care in old age than nonsmokers because they tend to die earlier.'' He adds, ''They also spend less time in nursing homes and take less money out of Social Security and pension funds.'' For instance, he examines so meticulously the various studies on the effects of advertising on smokers of various ages that you lose sight of his point that, as he eventually puts it, ''there is remarkably little evidence that advertising plays an important role in getting people to smoke, as opposed to getting them to smoke a particular brand.'' (Strangely, in comparing the influences of various cartoon characters used in advertising, he wholly neglects to consider the sexual reference apparent in the physiognomy of Joe Camel and its influence as a potentially subliminal persuader.)

And in his examination of secondhand smoke, he seems to stress so emphatically how irritating to nonsmokers it can be that you are taken aback by his conclusion that because its actual harmfulness has actually not been proven, the Government ought not to ban smoking in public places. ''By stepping in and imposing the same smoking policy on everyone,'' Mr. Sullum writes, ''the Government destroys diversity -- the potential to satisfy a wide variety of tastes and preferences, not just the majority's.''

Yet while his logic may seem sound from point to point, the overall impact of his argument leaves something out. Contrary to his insistence that all smokers take up the habit fully aware of its consequences to their health, I myself and the people I knew started smoking as teen-agers in the early 1950's because the culture sent us a message that the benefits outweighed the risks. The worst we heard was the folk wisdom that smoking might stunt your growth. But to offset that, as Mr. Sullum is the first to admit, everything in the culture of the 1940's and 50's, from movies to entertainers to the words of popular songs, reassured us that smoking would in various ways improve our lives. Cigarette smoke was quite literally everywhere in the air we breathed.

Twenty-five years later I quit because my doctor handed me an electrocardiogram with evidence of damage that cigarettes were very likely causing. To do so was relatively easy. What had changed? Mr. Sullum says nothing really; people have always known that cigarettes are harmful, and they have always chosen to smoke despite this knowledge. The only difference was the totalitarian zeal of the nonsmoking majority to impose its will on the smoking minority.

But I was aided by the negative message about smoking that the culture was now sending. I was happy to be able to quit, and I appreciate going into public places and not having to breathe other people's smoke, whether it is harmful or not. To me things are better now than they were when I smoked.

Does this mean I'm in favor of prohibition, as Mr. Sullum implies must be the view of anyone who favors the present state of things? Absolutely not; his case against a total ban, whether applied to liquor, drugs or tobacco, is convincing. So maybe there are harmless degrees of the zealotry that he considers inevitably totalitarian. Maybe the totalitarianism he is worried about is like his characterization of the smoking habit itself: a little of it won't hurt you; only when it exceeds a certain limit does it begin to kill.

Yet it is to Mr. Sullum's considerable credit that he has made us even think about totalitarianism in this most unlikely context. By the end he has made at least plausible his attack on what he calls the ''collectivist'' public health movement. As he concludes: ''Of all the risk factors for disease and injury, it seems, freedom is the most pernicious. And you thought it was smoking.''