Britain just issued a ban that would shock Americans. I’m surprised by my reaction.

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Smoking, or at least the idea of smoking, has undoubtedly had a comeback recently. Celebrities are smoking again, or so it seems, since there are popular Instagram accounts dedicated to posting photos of them doing it. There have been pieces like the provocatively headlined “I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?” in the Cut, and a much-discussed feature in the New York Times in 2022 which interviewed young people outside bars in New York about why they loved smoking, full of try-hard reflections from the likes of Martin Amis’ daughter, no less, like “It is a joy to be contemporarily atypical.”

Partly, the new cigarette boom is due to the pandemic: People were miserable and stressed out and so leaned back into bad old habits. Partly it’s also a nostalgia for a 1990s of the imagination: a time before phones and before so many other social evils when people seemed casually glamorous and smoked a lot more cigarettes. But it runs even deeper than that, I think. A friend of mine coined the term “luxury fatalism” a few years ago to describe a sort of devil-may-care nihilistic attitude of which smoking is a part: Everything is going to shit and the future looks bleak, so you may as well have as much fun as you can where you can find it. Buy the shoes, go on the holiday, smoke the cigarette.

I get it. I have been very addicted to smoking on and off since my late teens. I too, have enjoyed many hundreds of cigarettes outside bars, at house parties, on sun loungers. I don’t smoke anymore, because it’s stupid and expensive and bad for you and all the other big-hitter reasons. But I do get it.

Things may be about to change permanently on the tobacco front here in the U.K., though. Our government has just passed a new law that, rather than restricting cigarette sales to over-18s, would mean that people born after 2008 will never be legally allowed to buy cigarettes. Not when they turn 18, not when they turn 21, not ever.

The plans for the U.K.’s version of this birth-year ban began under then–Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2023, and it was voted through the House of Commons in 2024 and finally the Lords late last month. It will come into effect on Jan. 1, 2027. Health minister Baroness Merron told the House of Lords, “It is, in fact, the biggest public health intervention in a generation.”

It’s the first law of its kind to pass anywhere outside of the Maldives, which introduced its own version of the act last year. They tried to do it in New Zealand too, in 2022: That plan also included a significant reduction in the legal amount of nicotine in cigarettes, and limiting their sale to specialized tobacco stores. It got repealed in 2024 when a new right-wing government came to power, who seemed pretty plainly to be in cahoots with—quelle surprise—Big Tobacco.

A bunch of things have been tried in the U.K. to stop people smoking. Banning it indoors, first, then in a wider and wider range of public spaces. Most notably, perhaps, and most different from the U.S., there was the removal of branding from cigarette packets. Reliably, when I go to America, a friend will ask me to bring back some comparatively cheap, nicely designed cigarettes for them. Over there, you have written warnings on cigarettes about their negative health effects. We have those too, but we also have images designed to put you off your fags. Some of these are more distressing than others. There’s one, of a cancerous-looking growth on a chronic smoker’s neck, that is reasonably unpleasant to have to look at, but there is also one of an infant reaching for its mother’s cigarette that unfortunately looks kind of rad and that I have myself referred to in the past as “the cool smoking baby.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been trying to get these images on your packets, too, but it keeps getting stuck in legal limbo with it because of First Amendment–related objections as well as, of course, your friend and mine, the tobacco industry.

How will the U.K.’s new ban work? It won’t be a criminal offense for someone born after 2008 to buy cigarettes, but it will be illegal for the person selling them. It will also be an offense to buy cigarettes on the behalf of someone underage. So the onus will fall on retailers. Kids proper are not really smoking very much: A National Health Service survey in 2023 found that 1 percent of 11-to-15-year-olds in England were regular smokers, the same proportion as in 2021, down from 9 percent in 2005, for instance. Partly this must be because they are vaping and using nicotine pouches like Zyn in increasing numbers, which is worrying in its own right. But the idea is to catch young people before they become real smokers, which they tend to do in their later teens, if they’re going to at all.

The bigger question is whether it is going to work. My first instinct was, if I’m honest, nope. In my youth in London, it was illegal to buy cigarettes under the age of 16, but my friends and I were still smoking at 14 and 15. There were known corner shops where the proprietors didn’t care that you were plainly a child, and sold you cigarettes anyway. Or people asked their older siblings to buy them. There are always going to be ways around a ban like this.

The other arguments against the ban are many, some more convincing than others. It’s a time in the U.K. where “protect the youth” initiatives like age verification online are thorny issues, and some view this as overkill. I’m not much moved by pleas that shopkeepers need cigarette sales to keep the doors open. Retailers make 8.5 percent profit on tobacco products, against 21 percent for most other products. The people making money off cigarettes are tobacco manufacturers. But other arguments against the new law include the risk of creating a tobacco black market, and the slippery-slope thinking that alcohol or fast food might be next on the nanny state’s list of things that are bad for us that they could snatch away. Inevitably, we have to talk about freedom here. But as ever, there’s a distinction to be made between freedom from and freedom to. Freedom to choose to smoke is one kind of freedom. Freedom from the grasping hands of Big Tobacco and a lifetime of health problems is another.

Men Across the Country Are Artificially Inflating Their Penises. They’re Doing It for a Reason You’d Never Expect.

Generally, it’s worth noting, the move is a popular one. According to a YouGov poll in 2024, 52 percent of smokers supported an age-pegged permanent ban, and 78 percent of all those polled were in favor of the idea of a “smoke-free generation.” The law has support across party political lines, too.

And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, it’s not perfect, but it’s probably worth a shot. Yes, people determined to buy cigarettes who are below the age limit will still find ways to smoke. But the introduction of more friction could well help. Something has got to give with cigarettes. A member of my family who is in his 70s, who has battled addiction to cigarettes all his life, began smoking aged 8. Eight! Educating people about how bad smoking is for you hasn’t worked. Making cigarettes expensive hasn’t worked. Limiting the places you can smoke hasn’t worked. That’s because smoking is cool. You may not like it, you may wish it were otherwise, but it is true. That is the crux of the whole problem with cigarettes, really. People start smoking because they think it is a cool thing to do. People look good smoking cigarettes. And the drive to feel and look cool is very, very powerful.

Then again, reliably, what makes something seem cooler? Banning it.

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