The End of Cigarettes Is Coming

For almost two decades, British retailers have told customers that if they were born after the current date 18 years ago, they can’t buy cigarettes. Starting next year, that date will freeze. Under a recently passed law, selling cigarettes to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, will be illegal—in perpetuity. As long as the law is in effect, no one who is 17 or younger on New Year’s Day 2027 will ever be allowed to buy tobacco legally.This generational tobacco ban represents a very different approach from the tobacco-control policy that most Americans are used to. The U.S. regime looks more like what the drug-policy scholar Mark Kleiman called “grudging toleration” toward cigarettes: tax, regulate, and scold, but stop short of outright bans. The new British approach will, eventually, lead to outright prohibition.Prohibition. The word conjures the specter of violence, crime, and policy failure. But the United Kingdom isn’t the first jurisdiction to impose a generational ban, and it probably won’t be the last. The tiny island nation of the Maldives did so in November. New Zealand passed one in 2022, but a new governing coalition took power and repealed the law before it could go into effect. Here in the United States, 22 towns in Massachusetts, beginning with the Boston suburb of Brookline, have passed a generational ban, a possible precursor to statewide legislation.[Conor Friedersdorf: The U.K. smoking ban is illiberal]The spread of such prohibitions raises the counterintuitive possibility that tobacco bans are in fact a consequence of grudging toleration, rather than a departure from it. Decades of legal intolerance have steadily eroded the user base and cultural support that justified legality in the first place. Stigmatizing smoking, in other words, seems to have created the basis for an outright ban. That dynamic has implications not just for tobacco, but for the many addictive products now dominating a growing share of our economy, including social-media an