It’s been quite a busy week for me. I’ve written about Rishi Sunak’s preposterous tobacco ban for The Spectator and The Critic and I should have something in the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow, but I have one more thing to say.
I was struck my this line in Sunak’s speech:
People take up cigarettes when they are young. Four in five smokers have started by the time they are 20.
There was a time when anti-smoking campaigners would bemoan the fact that a large majority of smokers started before they were 16. After the smoking age was increased to 18, they started talking about how many smokers had started before they were 18, which was still a lot.
But now we are supposed to be concerned that most smokers started before the age of 21?!
The fact that the ‘public health’ groups that briefed Sunak have had to resort to upping the age bracket is an indication of how few people start smoking as children these days. The Khan Review, published last year, included some interesting statistics, as shown below.
The most common ages at which people start smoking are 18 and 19. More people start smoking aged 20 than aged 15.
Khan doesn’t give a reference for these figures so I don’t know how far back the data goes. If we’re still asking people aged 60 when they started smoking then it doesn’t tell us much about the current generation. I assume the survey only asks younger people but I don’t know for sure.
Either way, more people are taking up smoking as adults than as children - and when I say ‘taking up smoking’ I mean ‘having their first cigarette’. Having one cigarette does not necessarily lead to a lifetime of addiction, regardless of what ASH might tell you.
For decades, the anti-smoking narrative was that kids start smoking because of peer pressure (and, in the old days, advertising) before becoming hopelessly addicted. In a clever piece of rhetoric, campaigners described smoking as a paediatric disease because “tobacco use disorder almost always starts in childhood or adolescence”. Adult smokers were portrayed as slaves to a habit picked up when they were too young to make an informed choice. Since no adult would be stupid enough to start smoking, all that had to be done was prevent kids smoking and a tobacco-free future was guaranteed.
This looks increasingly untenable. Far fewer people start smoking these days but those who do pick up the habit when they are old enough to make an adult decision because they are, in fact, adults.
Rather than respect the choices of adult consumers, the anti-smoking lobby has had to start redefining what an adult is. Here is what Khan says about the graph above.
Figure 5 shows the rate at which people start smoking across a range of ages from 11 to 24 years old. The most common age to start smoking is 18, where the rate increases to 4% for women and 5% for men. The rates increase to 18 years old and decrease afterwards, apart from a lower peak around 2% for men at 23 years old.
These are the same young people who are most likely to grow up in smoke filled homes, to have friends who smoke, to have never known their grandparents because they have died early from smoking related diseases. For these young people especially, we must make smoking obsolete.
The assumptions he makes about these people’s backgrounds and grandparents is sheer guesswork, as far as I can tell. What is interesting is the slippery use of the term ‘young people’. We are talking here about 18-24 year olds. Khan talks about these grown men and women as if they were children and he is their guardian.
Is there any age at which a person can try a cigarette for the first time without being patronised and infantilised by the ‘public health’ lobby? Khan disagrees with the choices these adults are making and so he is going to make smoking ‘obsolete’ for them! Where does the government find these messianic weirdos?
The anti-smoking crusade has got a lot of mileage out of ‘think of the children’ rhetoric over the years. Now their issue is not so much with children taking up smoking as adults taking up smoking. Their solution, proposed by Khan and now endorsed by the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is to ban an increasing number of adults from buying tobacco. All of which suggests that it was never really about children, doesn’t it?
what about cigars?
Indeed, they are being increasingly patronizing and paternalistic. And now young adults are the target for their patronizing paternalism. Here in the USA, they already raised the smoking age to 21 in recent years, which is absolutely ridiculous (kinda like our 21 drinking age).