Since tobacco first arrived on the shores of England in the late 16th century, some Brits have wanted to eradicate it. Back in 1604, King James I was so alarmed about his country’s new smoking habit that he imposed a 4,000 percent tariff on the crop. That year, he wrote one of the world’s first anti-tobacco essays, declaring smoking “lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs.”
Despite the best efforts of the king and the generations of anti-tobacco activists who followed him, people in the United Kingdom still smoke. Now advocates are hoping a new law that prohibits anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, from ever buying cigarettes will finally end the habit for good. But the tobacco-free generation, at least in the short term, is unlikely to truly be tobacco free.
Generational tobacco bans were first proposed in 2010 by a group of researchers in Singapore. Around that time, less extreme anti-tobacco measures—such as media campaigns, clean-air laws, and taxes—had reduced smoking in many countries to such a point that public-health advocates started to seriously consider policies that could shrink rates to effectively zero. A tobacco “endgame,” as it has become known, was in sight. “I want to stamp out smoking for good,” Rishi Sunak, the former U.K. prime minister, said in a statement when he first proposed the plan in 2023.
Currently, U.K. residents need to be 18 or older to purchase cigarettes. The new generational ban will introduce a more unusual paradigm: Beginning on January 1, 2027, an 18-year-old born on New Year’s Day 2009 will not be able to buy products such as cigarettes and chewing tobacco for the rest of their life. But a friend born one day earlier would face no such barrier. That means, as some critics of the ban have pointed out, that 18-year-olds will almost certainly bum cigarettes from older friends—the same way younger teens have acquired them since time immemorial. Data suggest that most adolescent British smokers get cigarettes for free from older people they know. In one study, in which researchers interviewed British smokers as young as 12 about how they obtained cigarettes, kids who waited outside of tobacco shops in the hopes that an older customer would buy for them reported mostly targeting people under 25.
Lawmakers included language in the bill designed to dissuade older people from buying cigarettes for their underage acquaintances. But, more important, that issue will likely work itself out over time. By 2034, no one under 25 will be able to purchase cigarettes. And with each passing year, kids’ sources of illegal cigarettes should progressively dwindle. Because having peers who smoke increases young people’s chances of starting themselves, fewer kids being able to get their hands on cigarettes should have a ripple effect, dissuading more and more of their peers from experimenting. By 2079, no one under 70 will be legally able to smoke. It will become the habit not of teenage rebellion but of retirement homes.
This all depends, of course, on retailers actually following the law—a big if, according to some tobacco-control experts I spoke with. In a 2023 NHS survey, one-third of youth smokers reported regularly (and illegally) buying cigarettes from shops. “I don’t think we should play down the need for enforcement,” Nathan Davies, a doctoral fellow at the University of Nottingham who studies tobacco control, told me. And even if shopkeepers play by the rules, other people might not. Consider the small Himalayan nation of Bhutan, where all tobacco sales were banned in 2004 but cigarettes remained easy to access because a black market quickly cropped up. Those dealers didn’t serve just existing smokers but also young children. In 2019, nearly a quarter of 13-to-15-year-olds in the country used tobacco.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform U.K. Party, has repeatedly insisted that such a black market could appear in the U.K. too. But the country’s experiment was not technically a generational tobacco ban, unlike the policy in the U.K., which was crafted to ensure that most current smokers can continue to buy their products legally, thus shrinking the profitability of any black market. The Bhutan and U.K. policies are “structurally so different in scope, sequencing, enforcement infrastructure, and market context that the comparison generates more confusion than insight,” Kashish Aneja, who leads initiatives in Asia at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me via email.
No actual generational tobacco ban has existed for enough years to reveal its long-term effects. The Maldives, a small island nation south of India, implemented such a policy in November. Several Massachusetts towns have also passed similar bans. Brookline, a wealthy suburb of Boston, was the first, enacting its own version in 2021. Available data suggest the ban has had little effect on cigarette smoking thus far, but according to advocates, real change will take much more time. “It is a slow and gentle policy change which will result in changes over the mid and long-term,” Mark Gottlieb, the executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at the Northeastern University School of Law, told me in an email.
New Zealand’s left-wing Labour Party passed a tobacco-free-generation policy in 2022. But the country’s new center-right coalition government, on taking power in 2024, repealed the law before it went into effect. The government’s stated reasons for the repeal were so that cigarette-tax revenue could pay for a slew of new tax cuts, and because, it was argued, the policy would have fueled illegal smuggling. Something similar might happen in the U.K. Farage, himself a smoker, has called the ban “puritanical” and vowed to repeal it if his party takes power.
He’s probably not the only one who’d like to see that happen. Tobacco companies urged Parliament not to pass the law, arguing that it was discriminatory and would not prevent youth smoking—and would increase crime, to boot. “Every year from 2027 onwards a generational ban will hand more of the UK tobacco market to the serious organised criminal groups who will use the proceeds of illegal tobacco to fund activities including terrorism, weapons trading, the distribution of narcotics and people smuggling,” Japan Tobacco International, which owns a number of the most popular cigarette brands in the U.K., wrote. (In a statement, a JTI spokesperson added to that list, writing, “Illegal tobacco in the UK has been linked to organized crime, including activities such as money laundering, human trafficking, and violence.”) The tobacco industry, along with smokers’-rights groups, also aggressively courted certain U.K. conservatives as the new ban was being debated, hosting them for lunches and at least one party.
I asked several major British tobacco companies whether they would like to see the ban repealed, but they declined to answer, instead emphasizing that they will work with the U.K. government to determine how the law is implemented. If the industry wants to continue fighting the ban, they’ll be aided by the fact that the policy will take so long to have real effects. A recent modeling study led by Davies found that the ban should result in smoking rates among people under 30 dropping below 5 percent—a commonly accepted goal of so-called endgame strategies—by 2049. That would give cigarette makers decades to publicize middling results, along with any instances of smuggling they can uncover.
Some proponents of tobacco-endgame policies have their own doubts about the feasibility of generational tobacco bans. Ruth Malone, a UC San Francisco professor who wrote one of the first articles articulating the idea of a tobacco endgame, has suggested that governments could instead pursue a “rapid ban” on cigarettes for people of all ages, additional restrictions on where tobacco can be sold, and prohibitions on all flavored tobacco products. Whereas generational bans give cigarette companies time to influence policy, Malone says, immediate policies would more quickly diminish the industry’s profits, and thereby its power.
Despite the debate, generational smoking bans are broadly popular. A poll commissioned by the anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health found that 68 percent of English people support the new ban. In New Zealand, about 60 percent of voters opposed the country’s about-face. Perhaps that’s because smoking remains one of the world’s leading causes of preventable death, or because the overwhelming majority of smokers regret ever starting. The new policy might not make much difference for today’s teens, but decades from now, a new generation really might avoid that lifelong error—as long as the ban actually sticks around.
