Smoking is back, baby (and it'll cost you $9,000)

Nostalgia aficionados, rejoice: cigarettes are back, baby!

After decades of declining rates, public bans, and the whole "they cause cancer, blah blah blah" of it all, it's officially cool to smoke again – at least, that’s what pop culture seems to want us to believe. Between Ryan Murphy’s romanticized take on Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s habit on Love Story, the casual smoking on HBO’s I Love L.A., and everybody on Industry lighting up to take the edge off between trades, movies and television are doing their part to convey the eternal coolness of a cigarette.

Then there's the real-life resurgence. Yung Lean casually puffs in the "STORM" music video as dancers perform intricate choreography around him. Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams is immortalized in fan edits after taking a drag at Paris Fashion Week. Influential figures like Bella Hadid, Charli XCX, Addison Rae, and Kylie Jenner all enthusiastically (and publicly!) fly the flag for Big Tobacco. Even we plebeians have joined the party: more than 1,500 people turned up for a collective smoke break in New York City’s Washington Square Park last November. After all, who doesn't love a little vintage throwback to the romance (and cigarette stink) of the '90s?

But here’s the thing: deep down, we know better. Cigarettes may be pop culture’s Cool Hip Thing™ at the moment, but in reality, they're expensive, they're addictive, and the people most likely to bear the actual cost aren't the ones making them look cool on Instagram.

This wouldn't be such a big deal if cigarettes were easy to put down, but they're very much not. In 2023, nearly 1.8 million Canadian smokers made at least one unsuccessful attempt to quit. A University of Toronto study estimates that it takes the average smoker around 30 serious quit attempts before succeeding, significantly more than the five to seven attempts that previous research suggested. Charli XCX looks glamorous surrounded by mountains of smokes, sure, but in real life, you'll be paying for every one of those cigarettes with your wallet and your health, even when you want to stop.

So what does a smoking habit actually cost? Well, it ain't cheap.

In Canada, the price of cigarettes varies based on provincial sales tax – for example, Newfoundland gets taxed higher so a pack there costs around $16, while in Quebec, a pack tends to go for around $12. For this thought experiment, though, we'll go with Ontario taxes and prices: a pack of 20 cigarettes costs between $16 and $20, a pack of 25 costs between $19 and $25, and a carton goes for $125-$190. For simplicity, we'll consider packs of 25.

So: an average pack of 25 cigarettes in Ontario will run you about $22. If you’re a social smoker, you might have 10 to 12 cigarettes a week, which adds up to between $457.60 and $549.12 every year – not too bad. If you’re an occasional and/or “light” smoker, odds are you average one pack of cigarettes a week, and at $22 per pack, that adds up to $1,144 every year. That's a bit harder to stomach, but tolerable.

But let’s say you’re a regular subscriber to the cigarette game and smoke about a pack a day (and that might even be a conservative estimate). That will cost you $8,030 per year, or nearly $700 a month, just to smoke. And if you opt to buy a carton a week instead, an average price of $172.50 per carton means you'd pay $8,970 every year, or nearly $750 a month. In an era when people are splitting grocery runs across four Klarna payments, spending as much as $9,000 a year on cigarettes because Charli XCX looks cool might not be the smartest choice.

It doesn’t only add up at the register, either. In Canada, life insurance and benefit plans (including dental, disability, and drug coverage) treat anybody who smokes one cigarette per year as a bona fide smoker, typically charging double the premium of a non-smoker.

The people most likely to smoke are also the ones least prepared to absorb the costs. According to the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit, the largest share of Canadian smokers (19%) earn between $40,000 and $69,000 a year, followed by those who earn less than $40,000 (15%). (Top earners – those bringing home more than $100,000 – represent the smallest share at just 7%.) For someone earning $69K, they're spending more than 10% of their income on cigarettes; if their annual salary is $40K, that habit consumes one of every five dollars of their income. (And that's before taxes.) The habit just gets more expensive, too: Canadians paid 9.4% more for cigarettes in 2023 than the year before, and 32.3% more than they did in 2019.

We know the reality of what cigarettes can do to the body: heart disease, stroke, cancer, and tooth decay are just a few of the effects of regular smoking (not to mention the more immediate issue of smelling like a literal ashtray). Every year, 45,000 Canadians die as a result of smoking (with lung cancer accounting for 16,000 of those deaths) and smoking-related diseases cost Canada’s healthcare system an estimated $6.5 billion every year. For the celebrities making it look cool, a smoking habit is an aesthetic choice with a safety net. For the Canadians most likely to actually smoke, there's less community support, limited sick days, and no personal assistant to book the doctor's appointments.

The cool cigarette aesthetic has always been more about image than reality. Charli XCX, Yung Lean, Hudson Williams, and the rest are selling a version of smoking that doesn't actually exist for the people who really smoke. Celebs get a personal branding bump, and everyone else gets drawn into the idea of a $9,000-a-year habit that affects their future income and health somehow being worth it. Regular people are the ones who will actually pay for cigarettes becoming cool again, and they'll keep paying even long after they quit.