After the Cigarette: A New Generation of Tobacco Laws

In the Maldives, evenings arrive gently. The heat loosens, the sea darkens by degrees, and people drift toward the beach and the sand. But the familiar figure of someone balancing a cigarette and a drink has become curiously hard to find. In November 2025, the government brought into force a law that effectively makes it illegal for anyone born on or after January 1, 2007, to purchase or use tobacco products, in an effort to cultivate a “tobacco-free generation.” Vendors are now required to verify age before any sale, and the legislation applies to both residents and tourists, a somewhat unusual imposition in an economy so dependent on global visitors. What is singular about the new measure is not the punitive potential but the way it redesigns the future: it does not ask adults to smoke less, it simply decrees that certain cohorts will never smoke at all. In my conversations with locals working at an island in the Baa Atoll where nothing appeared to be in a hurry, not even luxury, many described it as an unavoidable environmental decision, akin to water conservation or reef protection.

India’s tobacco strategy involves making tobacco materially and socially more costly. The Central Excise (Amendment) Bill, 2025 has significantly increased excise duties on tobacco products across the board, imposing duties between Rs 2,700 and Rs 11,000 per thousand cigarettes, with similarly steep hikes on other tobacco products, including unmanufactured tobacco and certain chewing and smoking preparations. Under the revised excise regime, duties on chewing tobacco will rise to 100 per cent from 25 per cent, while hookah tobacco will attract a 40 per cent excise, up from 25 per cent. Smoking mixtures face the sharpest escalation, with excise climbing fivefold—from 60 per cent to 300 per cent. Officials estimate that a cigarette currently priced at around Rs 18 could cost as much as Rs 72 once the higher duties are fully passed on to consumers.

India already imposes some of the highest tobacco taxes in the region, yet cigarettes have remained relatively affordable when measured against incomes, by the government’s own past assessments. The scale of the latest hike signals a shift in intent: taxation is being pressed into service as an explicit public-health instrument. The move was positioned by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman in parliament as a way to keep tobacco products from becoming “affordable”, pointing out that total taxes on cigarettes in India, at about 53 per cent of retail price, lag behind the World Health Organisation’s recommended benchmark of 75 per cent, which is associated with lower consumption levels.

Smoking is after all one of the leading drivers of disease and death in the world today. Tobacco use is responsible for more than 7 million deaths annually, including an estimated 1.6 million among non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke, making it one of the most significant preventable causes of mortality worldwide. Globally, tobacco exposure accounted for an estimated 7.36 million deaths and more than 200 million disability-adjusted life-years lost in 2023, with the burden rising in many regions over recent decades. Smoking’s health toll spans cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory illness, stroke, and cancers. It contributes to about 25 per cent of all cancer deaths globally and dramatically increases the likelihood of lung cancer and heart disease among users.

In India, the toll is particularly heavy. Tobacco use, both smoked and smokeless, contributes to over 1.35 million deaths annually, and fuels a large share of the country’s cardiovascular, respiratory and cancer burden. Of these deaths, a substantial portion is attributable to smoking, which elevates risks for heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and multiple cancers, and accelerates life years lost among habitual users. The economic consequences are also stark: tobacco-related illness and early death siphon off income, strain health systems, and depress productivity, with the World Health Organization estimating the economic cost of tobacco in India at about 1 per cent of GDP (2017–18).

In a society where smoking sits unevenly across regions and social strata, the tax bill is meant to disincentivise consumption without explicitly criminalising it. Public-health experts have cautioned that high taxes alone are no silver bullet, arguing for stronger cessation support and sustained public education campaigns alongside fiscal levers. Others worry about market distortions or the impact on small tobacco growers and beedi workers.

Move beyond South Asia and you encounter an array of experiments in tobacco governance, each calibrated to its own social structures. In France, the smoking ban that once stopped at café windows and interior doors now extends into several outdoor public spaces, including beaches, parks and areas near schools, with fines for violators. Belgium has gone further on the nicotine spectrum, banning the sale of disposable vaping products to stem youth uptake. Bhutan’s Tobacco Control Act, enacted in 2010, bans the production and sale of tobacco and tightly regulates its import and use, rooted in a national philosophy that links physical health to collective happiness.

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill in the United Kingdom, still progressing through parliament, aims to phase out the sale of tobacco by incrementally raising the legal age cohort, a deferred generational restriction that would prohibit sales to those born after January 1, 2009. New Zealand’s earlier attempt to ban the sale of tobacco to people born after the same date was legislated in 2022 but subsequently repealed in 2024, underscoring how these policies can be politically fragile. And across Europe and parts of Asia, countries are experimenting with smoke-free outdoor zones, advertising restrictions, and high excise taxes, in each instance pushing past the old axis of indoor bans toward a broader reshaping of tobacco’s place in public life. Each approach carries imperfections, resistances and unintended consequences, but the collective impulse, in policy after policy, is toward a world in which smoking feels progressively more like an artifact of an older century.