There’s nothing inherently conservative about smoking. But while those who argue to the contrary are annoying, they’ve been punished enough.
There’s nothing inherently conservative about smoking. But while those who argue to the contrary are annoying, they’ve been punished enough.
‘S moking or non?”
I’m just old enough to remember sometimes being asked this question at restaurants. That eateries would designate some sections as fit for cigarette users seems ludicrous today. The public health crusade against smoking has not just pushed cigarettes outdoors, but also cast a pall (not that one) on the very notion of smoking them.
Partly in response to this successful campaign, some on the right have recently begun to view tobacco and other forms of nicotine delivery as not merely a pleasurable vice but a source of virtue. They are mistaken about this. But certain aspects of the reaction against them are excessive enough to warrant at least some sympathy.
Those conservatives who embrace nicotine present their current affinity as novel. And not in the sense that the habit is historically unusual. This would be absurd, given its past popularity, even specifically on the right. Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton belittled those who disliked tobacco as not having “an abstract standard of right” but rather having “no standard of right whatever” and “taking certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute.” National Review’s Florence King praised cigarettes in 1990 and decried anti-smoking campaigns as a “pogrom.” In 1994, libertarian gadfly Murray Rothbard (a nonsmoker) called smokers “America’s Most Persecuted Minority [sic]” and considered them an “important mass base for a right-wing populist counterrevolution.” Just a few years ago, a group of conservative columnists tried to portray smoking as an inherently virtuous activity.
The novelty of the current incarnation of nicotine advocacy arises from a supposed countercultural thrill. Writing in the Free Press, River Page identifies “a sense that nicotine has become more popular: a cause célèbre to be championed by a certain kind of conservative commentator who’s sick of Big Government getting in the way of their fun.” He singles out the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson as leading advocates of this tendency.
Both enjoy — and now sell — nicotine products. They also suggest a cultural conspiracy, by which modern culture supports many vices but forbids only one. “There are a lot of overweight people in America,” Carlson said in 2020. “Since they made us all quit smoking, it’s become a pretty fat country.” Knowles told Page that “our liberal establishment wants everyone to be hooked on depression pills and pot and opioids,” but “the one drug they seem to object to is nicotine.”
Reflexive contrarianism of this kind is not surprising, particularly after the Covid pandemic, when overweening government ukases sought to direct people’s health on a massive scale. It’s even possible that the success of the anti-smoking campaign emboldened the public health establishment to extend its remit. But Knowles, Carlson, and their like present a false choice between yielding to the pathologies of the present and succumbing to their preferred vice. The truly conservative path would eschew both, and rebuke the nanny state by proving it unnecessary.
The harms of tobacco have been known as far back as the 17th century, when King James condemned smoking as “dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.” Responding to King — Florence, not James — in 1990, former Claremont Institute senior fellow Harry Jaffa noted that smoking “kills over three hundred thousand Americans each year, more than lost their lives in the four years of World War II.” It was nearly 500,000 in 2024. (Jaffa, a lifelong fitness enthusiast, lived to age 96 — long enough to have the last word in almost all of the many arguments he had over the years.)
Non-tobacco-based forms of nicotine, such as Zyn pouches, are more defensible, especially as a means to wean smokers off cigarettes. Those on the right who enjoy them independent of this use would likely discount evidence that they present some health risks — even if they are safer than cigarettes. It is their right to do so. Though it is curious that some of the same conservatives who advocate a more robust state suddenly find their inner libertarian when it comes to something they enjoy.
They go further than that. It is ridiculous to say, as Knowles does, that “tobacco makes you more conservative.” And it is — one hopes self-consciously — absurd for Zynthusiast Greg Price to say that Democrats “fear a society when a man wakes up in the morning, drinks black coffee, pops a cool mint upper decky, and takes on the world.” Some conservatives enjoy these substances. But enjoying them does not make one a conservative. It is much more conservative to exercise the kind of self-restraint and self-discipline that eschews reliance on such things for pleasure and stimulation, and to prefer self-directed and wholesome means. To posture otherwise is to “ridicule virtue and celebrate vice,” as Jaffa put it.
So why, then, do nicotine fiends deserve some sympathy? Because the public health campaign against smoking has likely reached the point of diminishing returns, such that further government actions are now not just spiteful but counterproductive. Just last week, the outgoing Biden administration’s FDA proposed a drastic reduction in the nicotine content of cigarettes. Jacob Sullum rightly noted that the ban would outlaw currently legal transactions and bolster the black market. Most disturbing of all are proposals, evident elsewhere in the West, to ban smoking forever for people currently below a certain age. Such actions are so drastic that they not only make a non- and anti-smoker like me recoil, but also feed into the countercultural thrill of nicotine that is now one of its biggest sources of appeal.
We’re a long way away from the days of “smoking or non?” and they aren’t coming back. So how about a compromise: Smokers and other nicotine users, stop pretending that your habit is virtuous; smoking is bad for you, even if evidence about other methods is more mixed. Governments: Pocket your wins, enforce reasonable existing laws, and keep the stuff from kids. Leave the rest to persuasion. The nicotine-addled don’t need further punishment. They’re doing that to themselves.