This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Robert Conquest’s third law of politics is that the behaviour of bureaucratic organisations is best understood by assuming they are controlled by a secret cabal of their enemies. This could explain why the likes of the World Health Organisation seem so intent on propping up the cigarette trade. Indeed, it is quite possible there would be fewer smokers today if the anti-smoking movement had never existed.
Consider the history. The smoking rate in Britain more than halved between 1950 and 1990 without any heavy-handed measures. By the mid-1960s the evidence that smoking caused cancer was so compelling that health warnings were put on cigarettes, and a campaign of mass education was underway.
By the 1980s, all but the most recalcitrant contrarian accepted that smoking was bad for their health. That was enough to make millions quit or never start. Since smoking cessation is a contagious behaviour and children are half as likely to be smokers if their parents are non-smokers, a virtuous circle was created in which each generation was less likely to smoke than the last.
None of this would have required an anti-smoking lobby. The steady rise of taxes — the only anti-smoking policy that has ever really worked — probably accelerated the decline, but governments needed no “public health” encouragement to do that. Shrewd finance ministers were only interested in finding the sweet spot which maximised revenue without driving smokers to the black market.
in a parallel universe, that would have been the end of it. No advertising bans, no smoking bans, no plain packaging, no generational bans. In this alternative history, public health agencies appealed to smokers to quit, but it was not considered a matter for the government. Everybody knew that cigarettes were bad for their health, but the smoking rate was in steady decline and, after all, it was a free country.
The emergence of e-cigarettes in the 2000s (or possibly sooner in this parallel universe) was greeted by doctors with a sigh of relief. The WHO issued a statement explaining that nicotine could now be consumed pleasurably with negligible health risks and urged the tobacco industry to develop more low-risk products. An education campaign was launched to inform the public that nicotine does not cause cancer, that vaping is 95 per cent safer than smoking and that the risks of using nicotine pouches are approximately zero.
By 2020, the number of smokers in Europe had halved, and by 2030 it had halved again. By 2040, all the major tobacco companies had pulled out of the combustible tobacco business and the only suppliers of “analogue cigarettes” were boutique companies selling to a dwindling number of pensioners and hipsters.
The USA has a lower rate of smoking than Britain without display bans, plain packets or graphic health warnings
None of this happened or is likely to happen. Instead a thriving industry of insatiable anti-smoking campaigners created the new field of tobacco control that spawned an army of activist-academics who could “prove” any anti-smoking policy was “evidence-based”.
The whole thing was a giant bluff. The activists proposed a set of draconian and increasingly ludicrous policies, then credited them for the decline in smoking. In Britain, the fall in the number of smokers was attributed to display bans, graphic health warnings and plain packaging despite the USA achieving a lower rate without any of these.
By the time vaping arrived, the prohibitionist ecosystem was firmly established, and puritanism masquerading as “public health” had become a unifying political ideology.
Over-confident in achieving victory against the cigarette, the tobacco control industry found in e-cigarettes a new dragon to slay and set loose a series of hobgoblins about “popcorn lung” and the “gateway effect” in the public’s imagination.
Between 2013 and 2025, the proportion of Britons who believe vaping is as harmful or more so than smoking rose from 8 to 56 per cent. Four in ten smokers and six in ten doctors think nicotine causes cancer.
Far from challenging these myths, the WHO tells the public e-cigarettes are “not safe” and that nicotine is “harmful to health”. It has encouraged member states to ban e-cigarettes and 40 countries have now done so. Spurred on by rhetoric about the mythical “gateway effect”, the Netherlands recently banned nicotine pouches and other countries are lining up to follow suit.
In the UK, extortionate tobacco taxes have put a rocket under the black market and made the de facto price of a pack of cigarettes £5. With revenues in freefall, the government announced a new tax that would double the price of vaping and give smokers another incentive not to switch. In the EU, where e-cigarette taxes and flavour bans are common, the smoking rate has barely budged since 2014.
None of this could have happened without the anti-smoking lobby normalising prohibition and legitimising junk science. Without them, there would have been no anti-nicotine extremists, and if there were no anti-nicotine extremists there would be no problem. Instead, cigarette manufacturers ended up with a set of policies that could not have suited them better. A secret cabal of enemies indeed.
