After the pandemic are we really all smoking more? In short: yes – but the matter is slightly more complicated than that

Recently, The New York Times published an article named That Cloud of Smoke Is Not a Mirage, composed of a series of short interviews with students and residents of the Big Apple, who told in first person how, after the pandemic, they had returned to smoking cigarettes. This is not surprising: if in Italy smoking cigarettes is something very common, in the United States the percentage of smokers in the population had fallen to an all-time low of 14% during 2019. The result of a series of policies and a social consideration that had made smoking a trashy, unhealthy, dangerous and polluting vice – a type of consideration that even in Italy begins to arrive timidly with, for example, the ban on smoking at public transport stops imposed by the Municipality of Milan and the slow but steady rise in tobacco prices. Yet, in Italy as well as in New York, the statistics are clear: the pandemic has rekindled the problem of smoking among the new generations.

From a 2020 study by the Veronesi Foundation, for example, carried out on a statistically significant sample of children between 15 and 19 years old, it emerged that 42.5% are smokers while the Istituto Superiore di Sanità calculated that in 2021 in Italy there were 1.2 million more smokers than in November 2020. Also in the United Kingdom there has been a 27% increase in smokers in the age group between 18 and 34 years as well as in the United States while the hashtag #cigarette on TikTok touches the threshold of 819 million views to date. Referring to a study published in the Lancet, however, the magazine Health Desk wrote: «The percentage of smokers in the general population may also have decreased compared to previous years but, given the population growth, the absolute number of smokers has increased».

In essence, it can be said that social consciousness has not yet managed to reconcile what it knows about cigarettes and how it feels about cigarettes. The data are quite clear: an average of eight million deaths a year, which means that one in seven deaths is due to smoking, basically the same number of deaths caused by the Thirty Years' War every twelve months – and this without counting the other repercussions on health and the environment. On the other hand, however, it is undeniable that smokers exist and that above all they increase, and also that according to the calculations of Statista the tobacco industry has a total global value of 812 billion dollars and, according to Reportlinker, it will exceed 900 billion within the next four years. And perhaps it is precisely for this reason that the cigarette has preserved its countercultural aura over the years – that is, becoming the main battleground between the values and philosophy of political progressivism and those of the capitalist market.