Think Smoking is a Thing of the Past? Don't Hold Your Breath

How would we explain to a man from Mars that, daily and in significant numbers, humans put rolled-up tubes of paper filled with shredded vegetation in their mouths and solemnly set fire to them?

Depending on where you are, it can seem that the smoking habit should inexorably be disappearing. Cigarette addicts huddle miserably in the rain-swept doorways of smoke-free buildings, and suffer pariah treatment from their non-smoking workmates when they slink back to their desks. Airlines and dating agencies bar smokers from using their services. Advertising and sponsorship bans are proliferating everywhere. (You can no longer smoke in an Irish pub!). World Health Organisation figures have branded tobacco a bigger hazard to human health than malaria and tuberculosis combined. American juries hand down sentences requiring tobacco companies to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in punitive damages to smokers. It can't be long now, you'd think, before the "demon weed" disappears altogether.

In which case you'd be wrong. There are large parts of the planet where cigarette smoking continues to advance as an automatic fact of daily life. As prohibitionists, drug tsars and cigarette taxers usually find to their dismay, bad habits don't disappear, they just migrate, and enrich the bootleggers in the process. Britain has recently seen a marginal increase in cigarette consumption, but recorded legitimate sales have been noticeably down. The percentage of the market officially unaccounted for can only be attributed to the professional smugglers. When Canada hiked tobacco taxes in the early 1990's, Canadian cigarette exports to the neighbouring USA shot through the roof, then collapsed again when the taxes came off. A plausible explanation would be that all those filter-tips were quietly filtering back northward over the border.