The Generation That Will Always Be Too Young to Smoke
Like almost every smoker, I started when I was a child. Children aren’t supposed to smoke; it’s allegedly a part of the adult world, something you get inducted into once you turn eighteen. But everyone knows that the whole industry relies on kids. The younger the better; ideally, you’d go straight from the nipple to the filter tip. For an adult who didn’t already develop the habit, smoking is not a very attractive offer. Would you like to pay something north of a hundred thousand dollars over the course of your brief lifetime, just so you can smell bad, fail to taste your food, have difficulty walking up a gentle hill, and, eventually, die in agony, choking on your own phlegm? Probably not. But for a child this is a pretty good deal. There’s something kids want more than life itself.
Cigarettes are, notoriously, cool, but the coolness isn’t evenly distributed. France has a whole stable of glamorous black-lunged icons: Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve, Serge Gainsbourg, Coco Chanel. Americans have James Dean and Kurt Cobain. In Britain, where I grew up, we got Kate Moss, and that was about it. The iconic British smokers are all older, paunchier types, and most of them went for something with a bit more gravitas than a cigarette. Winston Churchill with his cigars; J. R. R. Tolkien with his pipe. These people had something, but it wasn’t cool. There are very few teen-agers desperate to look like Bertrand Russell. Even the cigarette brands are a little grotty. Philosophers have Gauloises and rock stars have Marlboro Reds, but a Benson & Hedges is smoked by a balding man in a carpeted pub, slowly turning his teeth the same color as his pint of warm ale. Today, the most prominent cigarette smoker in British public life is Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party and probably the country’s next Prime Minister. His appeal centers on his persona as an affable, lightly sozzled bloke in a country inn, the kind of person who ends half his sentences with “but of course you’re not allowed to say that anymore.” I don’t know if teen-agers want to be like him, either.
In my case, there wasn’t anyone I was trying to be. I was fourteen, and there was a girl I was trying to impress. So far, my track record had been mixed. Buying a T-shirt that said “SECURITY” in big white letters, on the understanding that it would lend me the masculine aura of a night-club bouncer, had not been a success. Drinking six bottles of a startlingly blue and surprisingly alcoholic liquid called WKD, and then falling over—that one, surprisingly, seemed to work a bit. The cigarette seemed like an obvious next step: proof that I wasn’t just some kid, but a man. Still, it was a tough one to take. When I was much younger, my parents had so thoroughly impressed me with the dangers of smoking that I’d started stealing packs of cigarettes off strangers’ tables at cafés and throwing them into the road. I couldn’t understand why my parents then got upset at me. Even later, once I’d grown up a little, I’d sadly concluded that I would probably never be able to smoke weed, because doing so sometimes involved mixing it with deadly tobacco. But now, at a house party in North London in 2005, I needed to be seen smoking. Doing this was tricky. It was easy enough to ask one of the slightly older guests to bum a cig, but I couldn’t then go over to the girl while puffing away; that would be too obvious. Her eyes would have to alight on me casually smoking in the distance, as if I did it all the time. So I spluttered down my first-ever cigarette, entirely unobserved, and had to go back to the same person again for another, and then, when she kept failing to notice that I was smoking, another one.
The next day, my parents told me that my clothes stank of smoke. Sure, I said; I’d been standing next to a smoker at a bus stop. I was a genius. I’d acquired brilliant new powers of lying. Then, when they were gone, I sat in the bathroom and smoked a cigarette in front of the mirror, trying out different ways of holding the thing, dangling it from different positions in my mouth, while the smell of smoke slowly permeated the whole house. I was up to two cigarettes a day before someone took pity on me and told me you were supposed to inhale.
At least I wasn’t alone. That summer, a large group of teen-age boys and girls would gather every night on Hampstead Heath to drink startlingly blue drinks and smoke cigarettes. Sometimes someone would bring alkyl nitrates, or poppers, which we knew were mostly used as a gay-sex aid but which were still the closest thing to a drug you could buy at a corner shop. We’d enjoy them by dipping a cigarette into the liquid and drawing on it unlit until our faces went red. Then, later, someone would accidentally light a popper-drenched cigarette and the whole thing would go up in flames, occasionally setting afire some hair or melting eyelashes in the process. We had all the ingredients of adulthood; everything was available. But we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
The U.K. has been trying to stop children from smoking for a long time. In 1908, it was one of the first countries in the world to restrict the sale of tobacco to people under sixteen. (There was some opposition to this in Parliament. The Conservative M.P. Sir Frederick Banbury objected to “this continual interference on the part of the State in the home life of the young.” Another M.P. asked Sir Frederick if he himself smoked. “No, I do not,” he replied. “That is to say, I smoke two cigarettes after dinner. I do not think that could be called smoking.”) The law stayed like that for ninety-nine years, until the age was raised to eighteen in 2007. At that point, I had managed to experience a few wonderful months of above-board smoking before the law clamped down on me again. Suddenly, I was forced back into lying to shopkeepers about my age on my way to school. I would tell them, “No, of course I’m eighteen. I just happen to not have any I.D. on me today.”
This experience is about to become a very common one. Last month, the U.K. became the first developed nation to institute a generational smoking ban. (It was narrowly beaten by the Maldives, which introduced a similar ban at the end of 2025.) If you were born after the first of January, 2009, you’re not just too young to smoke in Britain right now: you will always be too young to smoke. The idea is to create a “smoke-free generation,” making the current crop of young smokers the last this country will ever see. Doing it this way means you can potentially save millions of lives without ever taking away the right to smoke from anyone who currently has it. At the end of the century, when the last smoker born in 2008 coughs their last, all the cigarettes will vanish from behind the till at the newsagents’ and this island will be free of the scourge of tobacco forever.
That’s the idea, at least. Reality is likely to be a bit thornier. After all, the tobacco industry relies on people smoking even when they are, supposedly, too young to smoke. When I was an underage smoker at fourteen, getting access to cigarettes was never the problem. It’s hard to imagine that it’ll be the problem for underage smokers at thirty-four, or sixty-four. The only thing that will change is that people will continue to experience the small indignities of the cigarette-smoking child all through adulthood. One day, in the full bloat of middle age, you will get the kind of bad news that makes you need to sit down on a park bench with a cigarette and stare into the middle distance for a while, but you will be too young to buy a pack. One day, you will have white hairs on your head and still have to pretend that you left your I.D. at home.
It seems fitting that it’s Britain, and not any other country, leading the charge on this front. Living in modern Britain is a strangely infantilizing experience. Every encounter with any kind of public institution leaves you with the strange ambient sense that although everyone has an impressive stack of decades under their belt, none of them have quite grown up enough to buy a pack of cigs.
Take, for instance, the water thing. Last summer, when it failed to rain every day in Britain, the government provided citizens with a helpful list of ways they could personally save water. Take shorter showers, avoid watering the lawn, that sort of thing. The last item on its list read: “Delete old emails and pictures as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.” Maybe this sounds like it would make sense, if you’ve vaguely heard that data centers use a lot of water. But there are some problems. For one, the internet is global. The data centers storing your e-mails are probably not drawing from the same water sources as the toilet you read them on. What’s more, storing an e-mail for a month uses up about a thousandth of a millilitre of water, equivalent to a fiftieth of a raindrop. You could delete everything you have on the cloud and it would still do less to improve the drought than would spitting in your local reservoir. What does require extra power is actively writing to a drive—by, say, deleting old e-mails in an attempt to save water. This advice is roughly equivalent to the British state encouraging you to help save hospital beds by not stepping on the sidewalk cracks.
But this is what it’s like here. If you go to the Met in New York, the signage tends to assume that you’re a vaguely literate adult who is at least glancingly familiar with the general concept of art. Not here! To unfairly highlight just one example: at the Burrell Collection, in Glasgow, a “Figure of a dancing girl” from the Tang dynasty is explained with the following helpful plaque: “Do you like to dance? This girl does. She’s moving her body and clothes to show off her dancing skills.” Well, thanks for that.
If Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration has been increasingly beleaguered, that might be because it’s incapable of treating the voting public like adults. One of the great tasks of Starmer’s premiership has been to articulate a progressive, inclusive version of Britishness that can ward off Nigel Farage’s populist nationalism. How’s that going? Here’s his most prominent attempt, from a speech at a recent Labour Party conference: “Painting a fence, running the raffle, cutting the half-time orange, or even just that gentle knock on the door which checks your neighbor is all right. That’s real Britain.” Meanwhile, his government has recently voted to end the right to trial by jury. Per this proposal, cases in which the penalty would likely be three years or less in prison would be heard only by a single judge. Once, the most fundamental assumption in our political life was that the raffle-running, orange-cutting British public could be trusted to make important determinations for ourselves. That no longer seems to be the case.
Farage has promised that if he becomes Prime Minister he’ll repeal the generational smoking ban, and future generations will be free to light up without any government interference. But, in fact, what makes the generational smoking ban particularly pointless is that young people seem to be abolishing smoking anyway. Thirty years ago, nearly half of all British children between the ages of eleven and fifteen had tried tobacco; by 2023, it was eleven per cent. (It’s the same everywhere. Smoking might have become a Gen Z fashion statement in parts of New York, but across America teen smoking has fallen by nearly a third since 2019.)
There are maybe half a dozen schools crowded around where I live, in London; at 4 P.M. every day, the streets are full of kids in their uniforms yapping boisterously at one another. None of them are ever smoking. Instead, they all seem to live inside a synthetically fruit-scented vape cloud. Unlike cigarette smoke, vapor doesn’t stick so strongly to your clothes or drown you in your own fluids. But although British people might not be the suavest smokers in the world, absolutely no one has ever looked cool while hitting a vape pen. You do not get to pretend to be a grownup by vaping; this brightly colored kiwi-flavored toy could only be a thing for children. This doesn’t seem to bother them. Across the world, adulthood is not as impressive as it used to be. You will be governed by petulant children or administered by condescending bureaucrats. And, anyway, smoking ages the skin. There’s something kids want more than growing up. ♦