The war on smoking is now a war on free speech

An article about smoking has caused a bit of a stink (no pun intended).

Written by Xochitl Gonzalez, a New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, it was published last week by The Cut, an online magazine that is part of New York Magazine. A former ‘casual’ smoker, Gonzalez made the mistake of writing an essay that takes a more nuanced view of smoking than we have come to expect in the mainstream media.

Inspired, in part, by a friend who was visiting her and had taken up smoking again, Gonzalez addressed the habit in the context of the bigger picture, including a yearning for the past, ‘Not in an effort to recapture my youth, but to recapture an approach to time and life’.

Noting the frenetic pace of life in both her physical and online worlds, ‘This could be my rebellion,’ she mused, because while smoking represented ‘chaos’ and ‘excitement’ in her youth, it now offered a chance to ‘stop what I’m doing, ask somebody to come outside, and take five minutes to slow down with me … Is it really any worse for us than the numbing digital go-go-go it feels we’ve all been engaged in?’

So far that heretical thought seems to have been the extent of her ‘rebellion’ because, as she also notes, ‘I’ve yet to break down and buy a pack of cigarettes’. I wonder if this is because, while she recalls her youthful experience of smoking as ‘divine’, the habit she gave up in her thirties is ‘obviously, very bad for you’. Furthermore, ‘smoking kills’.

None of this suggests someone who is ignorant of or complacent about the health risks, but the article has nevertheless provoked an angry – some might say hysterical – response. A New York Mag tweet promoting the article quickly went viral and currently has 5.1 million views with over 600 comments, the vast majority of them highly critical of both the article and the magazine’s decision to publish it. Here’s a selection:

‘Ok I can think of one really really really good reason why we shouldn’t all start smoking again. Does the article address this?’

‘This is me on my first day of chemotherapy …'

No one reads @NYMag anymore because you constantly publish idiotic shit like this.

I know what it feels like when smoking starts to kill you, because I have been there; that is why I support THR like pouches and vaping.

The number one preventable cause of death is smoking. Please do not publish articles making it seem cool to kill yourself.

Cigarettes are disgusting and promoting their usage is irresponsible.

Why is New York Magazine promoting cigarettes? Smoking is not romantic. It’s deadly and it’s gross.

Why would you give column inches to this. Precious space on your server that could be used for anything else.

This is a really bad article to write. Please do not promote smoking.

How does slop like this make it to print?

I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of people who have commented haven’t read the article because it’s behind a paywall and to read it I had to pay $12 dollars for a three-month trial subscription (which I must remember to cancel!).

Instead I suspect they are responding to the headline which does look like clickbait but it also includes an important question mark that almost everyone has overlooked – ‘I mean, why shouldn’t we all smoke cigarettes again?’. Had the headline screamed ‘Why we should all smoke cigarettes again’ it might be different (although I would still defend the editor’s right to publish such an article), but Gonzalez doesn’t argue that at all.

Yes, her article may be flawed but it’s a perfectly legitimate take on the nature of modern life. Instead, the hostile, knee-jerk reaction suggests that it’s not just smoking the stop smoking brigade want to eradicate. They also want to censor anything that, in their view, is ‘pro-smoking’. (Forest has been wrongly tarred with the same ‘pro-smoking’ brush for decades so I know how this is designed to work.)

To be clear, I sympathise with anyone who has a serious smoking-related illness, but people must be allowed to write about smoking without being obliged to describe in detail the impact of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), or the benefits of switching to vapes and nicotine pouches.

I mention the latter because several pro-vaping advocates have also been critical of the article. One responded by referring dismissively to the ‘frivolous, frothy influencers who think it might be cool and contrarian to talk up smoking’. Is Gonzalez, a bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, in that bracket? I hardly think so.

In my view the reaction has gone way beyond the usual war on smoking. What we are witnessing is also a war on free speech. I don’t agree with everything she wrote in her article, but she has every right to share her thoughts on smoking, and The Cut has every right to publish them.

People have the right to criticise as well but, as I say, I’m pretty sure most of the comments are based on the headline not the article. It’s noticeable too how many people are questioning The Cut’s decision to publish the article.

I see a day in the not too distant future when articles like this (and Kara Kennedy’s ‘An ode to smoking’) will either be published with a compulsory trigger warning or, more likely, will never see the light of day because they will be spiked by editors worried or intimidated by the threat of a backlash from noisy and illiberal keyboard warriors.

The fact that they include members of the pro-vaping lobby won’t surprise readers of this blog because, as I’ve pointed out several times, intolerance of smoking and a desire to consign the habit to history is one of the motivating forces that seems to drive many pro-vaping campaigners.

And while many pro-vaping activists insist they are tolerant of smoking, it’s usually in private, rarely in public. In the meantime they are very happy to be supported by long-standing anti-smoking campaigners whose goal has always been the eradication of cigarettes, and therefore smoking.

Meanwhile the tobacco control lobby is gunning not just for smoking but even articles and essays they consider ‘pro-smoking’. So much for free speech!