A March 20 headline in the New York Post declared “Cigarettes are Back!” It seems that in liberal, health-conscious Hollywood, celebrities are smoking publicly and on magazine covers and cigarettes are big at the events, including in some instances provided to guests by the host. This is a good sign for those of us who oppose the nanny state, as the obsessive hatred of smoking has been one of the most egregious infringements on personal liberty in the last forty years.

The pretense of anti-smoking legislation, when one is given anything besides sheer hostility, is that smokers cost the taxpayer a lot of money due to healthcare and other expenses, though studies have shown the opposite is true. That this argument exists at all though demonstrates the libertarian point that big government creates situations where all of your personal behavior is a matter of public concern. I am not yet willing to believe that any of the egregious anti-smoking laws will be rolled back, but nevertheless, consider it a good sign for personal freedom that the cultural elites are publicly smoking after decades of trying to marginalize and expel smokers in the vaunted name of “public health.”

The dangers of tobacco have been known in various ways since it was introduced to Europe. However, it was not until the 1990s when the government and other powers in society began taking strong actions against cigarettes. In 1994 the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard wrote an essay calling smokers “America’s most persecuted minority,” where he writes:

“Which group, far from coming out of the “closet,” has been literally forced back into the closet after centuries of walking proudly in the public square? And which group has tragically internalized the value-system of its oppressors, so that they are deeply ashamed and guilty about practicing their rites and customs? Which group is so brow-beaten that it never thinks of defending itself, any attempt at which is publicly condemned and ridiculed? Which group is considered such sinners that the use of doctored statistics against them is considered legitimate means in a worthy cause?

I refer, of course, to that once proud race, tobacco-smokers, a group once revered and envied, but now there are none so poor as to do them reverence.”

Rothbard links the anti-smoking crusade to America’s history of Puritanism. He wrote back then that “We have arrived at the grisly land of Left Puritanism…which proposes to bring about a perfect world free of tobacco, inequality, greed, and hate-thoughts.” That is certainly what happened, though their lecturing about obesity and meat (which led to a similar backlash in favor of bacon) of course didn’t apply to their ideological fellow travelers for whom obesity was to be celebrated as “beauty at any size.” It is one rule for Wal-Mart shoppers and another rule for people who cry about being mistreated on YouTube.

We suffered through not only an endless propaganda campaign—much of it at taxpayer expense—but the dominoes did indeed fall against smokers rapidly. Smoking was segregated into special areas then banned entirely at most work places. It was banned at bars and restaurants, restrictions which traveled across the country and world rapidly starting only just over twenty years ago. Taxes went up exorbitantly at both a federal level and in most states. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump all restricted access to tobacco products in various ways; some of these hamfisted regulations were outright counterproductive to reducing smoking, such as banning the sale of single cigarettes, which many said helped them smoke less but which the anti-smokers considered a “gateway cigarette.” Many states sought absurd awards in civil suits against tobacco companies. It has reached a point where it is a rare place in America that a man is allowed have an alcoholic drink and smoke a cigarette at the same business. Often, this is not even allowed outside due to open container laws and workplace smoking “protections” (25 feet from any entrance an employee uses in my home state of Washington!)

In 2003, the anti-smokers had reached such heights of arrogance and absurdity that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a fanatical anti-smoker, had the office of the editor of Vanity Fair raided on reports of workplace smoking where they seized a clean ashtray which the editor had as a souvenir. Years later, Eric Garner was killed in a police encounter initiated by the fact that anti-smoking crusaders had taxed cigarettes so viciously that a man could make a living purchasing cigarettes from out of state and selling singles on the street. My own grandparents, though they were liberal ex-smokers with lung problems who were theoretically being protected by smoking restrictions, found this all to be egregious violations of personal freedom, unimaginable to people of their era.

1990s television is informative as to how fast this took over society. For example, in both Seinfeld and Friends no one smokes at all unless the story line is about how other people don’t like it and they get lectured by all of their disgusted friends. In the King of the Hill episode about smoking, Peggy says “only trailer trash smoke these days,” unlike just over a decade before when the Hills had quit. More telling is the acclaimed show Homicide: Life on the Street where in the first season from 1993 most of the characters smoke but over time either had storylines about quitting or left the show to be replaced by non-smoking characters—further, smoking in offices was banned during that time, which was featured on the show. As recently as 2019, Netflix said it would work to reduce smoking on its shows after complaints from the tireless tobacco activists about the frequency of smoking in the hit show Stranger Things. Of course, the show is set in the 1980s and smoking is necessary to portray the era accurately, but Puritanism does not care about art. For some reason, smoking must be listed on parental guidance, as if anyone is successfully shielding their children from the premise that smoking exists.

For all of this, Americans do still have some belief in personal liberty, so these Puritans had to cover their attacks on smoking in the name of the common good. They certainly made much hay with dubious claims about the harms of second hand smoke in all environments (though, for example, if you work in a warehouse, the ceilings are high enough you may as well be outside) but they had to come at smokers themselves. It was decided that smoking cost the taxpayers, and the economy generally, enormous amounts of money in medical expenses, which was the root of all the state lawsuits. This was disproven in studies in both the Netherlands and the United States around two decades ago. Such expenses can be measured a number of ways, and if you work hard enough looking into absenteeism due to sickness and that sort of thing a reduction in cost can be discovered, but the problem is obvious: non-smokers live longer during the period of their lives where they collect Social Security and use Medicare. It’s true that perhaps a smoker has a serious, expensive smoking-related illness and dies at 65, but that is much less expensive—and uses less healthcare—than a non-smoker living to 90 collecting Social Security, going to the doctor every week for the last ten years of his life, and nevertheless perhaps spending weeks in a hospital death bed. Raising taxes to reduce smoking also mostly harms the poor without helping the state’s finances, as any decrease in smoking it causes both reduces the taxes brought in but more importantly has people living longer and using more resources. None of this is, of course, to say that the state should encourage smoking to bring down the cost of providing social services, but this core claim justifying targeting smokers is false.

All of the above, as well as the fact that I am an avid smoker and do have a stake in this, is why it brought me joy to read that “Cigarettes are Back!” Perhaps my greatest joy of all was that Vanity Fair, once so persecuted by Mayor Bloomberg, was putting cigarettes out for party guests on an actual silver platter. The public has finally grown weary of the constant scolding which long drove smokers to hide their once-celebrated pleasure. I am not so much of a contrarian as to claim that it isn’t a good thing if fewer children smoke, but we also must live in a society where adults can make their own decisions, and anyway plenty of the anti-smoking crusade was built on lies. One hopes that, at least for the time being, it is the Puritans who will have to live with their fear that, as H. L. Mencken said, “someone, somewhere, may be happy.”