Group of friends lighting cigarettes and smoking together sitting on a bench outdoors, Image via Shutterstock.
At 84, conservative Washington Post columnist George Will is old enough to remember when cigarette smoking was ubiquitous in public places in the United States. But according to Gallup, the number of American adults who smoked cigarettes was down to 11 percent in 2024 compared to 41 percent in 1944 during World War 2.
In his April 1 column, Will argues that cigarettes — despite the high costs, restrictions in public places, and health risks — are "making a mild comeback." And he explores some possible reasons why.
"Until the mid-20th Century," Will explains, "smoking seemed sophisticated and glamorous. When it became perceived as dumb and déclassé, life became more regressive: The broadly educated, information-acquiring middle class heeded public health warnings, others not so much. Now, because learning, like everything else, is perishable, smoking is making a mild comeback."
The Never Trump conservative continues, "During the pandemic, when health fears left isolated people with time on their hands, some picked up cigarettes. The COVID-era smoking surge abated, but now, some celebrities are lighting up. Perhaps celebrity really does subtract from intelligence. And more smoking is appearing in movies. Perhaps the surgeon general should label Hollywood carcinogenic. This is an era in which, depressingly, 'influencer' is an actual job/career category."
Will points to Gen-X journalist/author and New York University professor Katie Roiphe's analysis of cigarette smoking trends. According to Roiphe, some American youths are so pessimistic about the future that the health risks of cigarettes don't deter them.
"The writer and professor Katie Roiphe surmises, in the Wall Street Journal, that 'in this era of wellness obsession, of kale salads and Pilates, people who are recklessly hedonistic, who choose pleasure over health, still have a certain kind of glamour,'" Will writes. "There now are so few norms to transgress, for some aspiring renegades smoking must suffice. Another Roiphe speculation: For young people, 'the terribleness of everything' — school shooters, climate change, the price of eggs, everything — suggests: Why not 'a little stylish self-destruction?'"
The conservative columnist adds, "Perhaps teaching middle-schoolers that they are destined to die on a boiling planet is a gateway to smoking."