Discouraging excessive consumption subject of law prof's latest book

In 1947 smoking was glamorous, getting caught gambling could land you in jail and Frank Sinatra released One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).

These days you can place bets on-line in the comfort of your own home, cigarettes are largely considered filthy, expensive and hazardous, and having one last cocktail before you get behind the wheel is generally frowned upon.

Those dramatic changes over a relatively short period of time are the result of a normalizing process of our vices that’s more a product of social engineering than of regulations created by changes in the law, according to university professor W.A. Bogart.

A member of the Faculty of Lawsince 1980, Bogart recently released a book on the subject called Permit But Discourage: Regulating Excessive Consumption(Oxford University Press, New York).

“It’s about the power of law to regulate consumption,” said Bogart, “but it’s also an analysis of the limits of law. It’s a look at the efforts to suppress forms of excessive consumption through different eras and cultures.”

Bogart’s sixth book, it also argues that over consumption of alcohol, cigarettes and junk food can be more effectively controlled by altering social norms via regulatory interventions such as taxation, prohibiting sales to children, restricting advertising and health education programming, rather than relying on the law itself to achieve the desired changes in behaviour. Legal efforts over the years to control excessive consumption have been at best partially successful and at their worst, spectacular failures, Bogart said, pointing to prohibition of alcohol in the 1930s as an example of the latter.

The book also devotes considerable attention to the thorny issue of problem gambling, examining a number of legal interventions that could be considered to help curb it within a regulatory atmosphere that still permits gambling but discourages addictive, out-of-control wagering.

“Only about three percent of gamblers are considered problem, but that three percent can cause enormous damage to themselves and others,” said Bogart, who received his B.A. and LL.B. from the University of Toronto and his LL.M. from Harvard University.

The book “clearly and compellingly argues for a mix of laws that permit consumption but discourage excesses,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University who reviewed Bogart’s book and described it as “a must read for anyone who cares about promoting health as well as human rights in a market-driven economy.”