In January 2022, the New York Times ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, quoting Martin Amis’s daughter saying it seemed like it was. In the summer of 2023, the Guardian ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Lily-Rose Depp looks great when smoking. Last month, the Guardian again ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Dua Lipa smokes and Charli XCX pretends to.
Smoking between 35 and 60, however, is really very dangerous
But it isn’t back, and there’s stats to prove it. However, what those pieces do say is that smoking retains its ‘cool’ image. We know that. Kate Moss and James Dean knew that. And because we know that, we can glean the real tragedy of Keir Starmer’s potential smoking ban – the aesthetic defeat. Nicotine is a decent, but not amazing, microdrug: it can marginally improve your afternoon and moderately improve your evening. But its real power is that it looks good, especially if you’re young.
I favour no real restrictions on smokers at all (I love smoking), but if you’ve really got to scratch that petty-tyrant itch, then here’s a modest proposal. One that preserves the charm of smoking while keeping the health costs limited: a maximum smoking age, of 35.
First, the health case. The Spectator’s Wikiman Rory Sutherland points out the following: ‘If you quit smoking at the age of 35, you are likely to enjoy the same life expectancy as if you were a life-long non-smoker’. After then, for every year you smoke, you lose three months, on average. Rory writes: ‘“Shit,” I remember thinking on my 35th birthday, “From now on every cigarette counts”.’ Now, obviously you don’t want 18-year-olds to know that, because they’ll think that they’ve got 17 years of risk-free smoking ahead of them, but you really want 34-year-olds to know that. So, once you turn 35, no more cigarettes for you. If you want to keep going past then, then you need decisions made for you.
The second argument is the aesthetic one. The median smoker in this country is not Dua Lipa. It is the poor 50-year-old bastards who nicotine exerts a cruel grip over, way out of whack with its pleasantness. The maximum number of cigarettes that (sans grog) it’s nice to smoke over the course of a day is probably five, but plenty of people need 20 or more. These people need saving from their dopamine wiring.
Saying older people look grim when they smoke might sound ageist. It’s not, that’s not what I’m saying. There is a real elegance and dignity to smokers above the age of 60. Look at David Hockney, Carlo Ancelotti, June Brown or the ladies and gentlemen that sit outside European patisseries with a coffee and a cigarette. They are enjoying a reward for a life well lived, a celebration of benchmarks passed, and a small rage against time. Perhaps police can turn a blind eye to them having a fag.
Smoking between 35 and 60, however, is really very dangerous. It’s very important that you do not smoke heavily in those years. A.A. Gill smoked 60 cigarettes a day until he was 48. On quitting, he said, ‘it didn’t feel like well done. It felt like a defeat – the capitulation to fear’. It didn’t matter. He died of lung cancer at 62. Christopher Hitchens quit smoking at 59. Too late: dead three years later. Hauntingly, there are probably a few smokers out there who missed cancer by a single cigarette, and those who succumbed because of one – one – too many.
The only problem with my scheme, as far as I can see, is age verification. What poor shopkeeper wants to say to a 28 year-old-woman, ‘um, I’m really sorry about this, but are you over 35?’ The old begging the young to buy their fags will be impractical, but probably quite funny.
Anyway, we should obviously leave smokers alone. Smoking is a beautiful habit because it is irrational. It is fun because it is so obviously insane to take up. It is a small rebellion against the drive for us all to be perfect. But people will always fight against that, as C.S. Lewis put fantastically:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies… those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.
These people are eternal, unfortunately (six in ten of us, according to YouGov), and we will need to find something for them to do. If we’re to let them have anything, at least let it be a sensible compromise. 35 then, that’s your lot.
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