How Covid Made Smoking Cool Again
Smoking culture is making a comeback after the public health scolds overplayed their hand
Last week, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services released a new “Tobacco-Free Report Card” celebrating the expansion of smoke-free and tobacco-free college campuses across the state.
The report boasts that 45% of Michigan colleges and universities now maintain full tobacco-free or smoke-free policies, while restrictions on e-cigarettes have rapidly expanded as well.
But 20.2% of Michigan 18- to 24-year-olds reported using e-cigarettes—more than twice the 8.5% of Michigan adults who use them.
Ironically, the harder institutions push against nicotine and tobacco, the more smoking begins to symbolize something bigger: rebellion.
You can feel it among younger adults who grew up during the most aggressively managed public-health era in modern American history.
Michigan Xennials, like myself, occupy a strange place in this cultural shift, because many of us remember both eras—the tail end of smoking culture and the rise of anti-smoking absolutism.
I started smoking in high school. Cigarettes made me feel older, tougher, and rebellious. Marijuana was still illegal. Alcohol was harder to get. Cigarettes were accessible and social.
The buzz of a cigarette still instantly transports me back to the parking lot behind the pizza place I worked at, late nights at dive bars in Jackson, camping trips Up North, backpacking across Europe in smoke filled trains, and late-night drives with the windows down singing Radiohead at the top of my lungs (some of you will get this reference).
In the ‘90s and Y2K Era, smoking shaped the social scene for young adults trying to figure life out before we had Google at our fingertips and our hands were too busy scrolling through social media to hold a cigarette.
By the late 2000s, adulthood arrived.
Smoking stopped feeling rebellious and started feeling embarrassing. We were growing up, getting married, starting careers and families. The anti-smoking campaigns of the early 2000s largely worked, because they still respected personal choice.
The message was persuasive, not authoritarian. So many of us quit.
Then Covid came. And suddenly the same institutions that spent decades carefully encouraging healthier behavior transformed overnight.
“Don’t leave your house.” “Wash your groceries.” “Don’t go to church.” “Don’t let your children play on playgrounds.” “Stand six feet apart.” “Wear a mask between bites.” “Take the shot or lose your job.”
Something broke during those years. If government institutions could be wrong, exaggerated, political, or manipulative about Covid, what else might they be wrong about?
After years of lockdowns, remote work, isolation, and endless moral lectures about how Americans should live, cigarettes have become psychologically tied to freedom and nostalgia for a time when every public-health decision became political and every interaction became digital.
Smoking functions as a quiet rebellion and a return to a simpler time.
A smoke break means stepping away from screens, leaving the Zoom call, escaping the algorithm, hitting “Unsubscribe,” talking to strangers outside bars.
And you can’t do it in a mask.
Public health spent decades turning cigarettes into social taboo. When public health morphed into social surveillance and social management, they lost our trust and made bad habits symbols of freedom.
