Britain’s young people don’t smoke cigarettes as much these days. Since 2011, smoking among teenagers has fallen steadily. Anecdotally, this rings true to me, and it is surely good. Smoking is, as you may have heard, bad for you.

But a study published recently in the journal, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, that suggests something weirder is also going on with young people and tobacco. Apparently, the number of adults in England using non-cigarette tobacco products – things like cigars, pipes and shisha – increased from about 210,000 in early 2020 to a peak of just shy of 1 million in mid-2022, falling back to 773,000 by September last year. What struck me as truly strange, though, was that the most likely group to use these products is young people. About 3.2% of 18-year-olds were smoking these things in September 2023, up from 0.19% in 2013. By contrast, only 1.1% of 65-year-olds were doing so.

Who are these young people huffing on cigars of an afternoon? Where are they? Why are they doing it? The published research doesn’t differentiate between the types of products. Plenty of young people enjoy smoking shisha with their friends. But cigars? The words “young person” and “cigar” do not go together in my mind. Pipes and young people, even less so. When I think of a pipe smoker, I picture an elderly man with a luxuriant white beard sitting........

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