Biden’s final attempt for a domestic legacy… a smoking ban

What is a legacy? Is it the sum of our actions? Is it the family and friends we leave behind? Is it banning cigarettes?

The consensus for exiting western leaders seems to be that last option. Just days before Joe Biden is to leave the White House, and hand the power back to Donald Trump, his administration is trying to push through a last-minute curb on the production of cigarettes, which critics are saying would not be far off from an actual “ban.”

The plan is to mandate a significant reduction in the amount of nicotine found in cigarettes, so that future products are less addictive, and less appealing, to consumers. The proposed changes, reported by Axios, have just been green-lit by the Food and Drug Administration, (which under the most radical proposals could reduce nicotine levels up to 95 percent), giving Biden one final chance to push the changes through before he vanishes from the Oval Office.

Will he take it? This seems to be the growing trend: leaders on the way down reaching for some form of cigarette crackdown. It started in New Zealand in 2022, when lockdown starlet Jacinda Ardern — riding the wave of liberty infringement — announced the world’s first generational smoking ban, which would have stopped the sale of cigarettes to any adult in the future who was born after January 2009. Less than a year later, she resigned, and less than a year after that, the new right-wing coalition government announced it would be scrapping the ban, using the revenue that would be raised for further tax cuts.

None of this stopped the latest iteration of the Tory government in October 2023 from announcing the same policy. Clutching for straws at the bitter end of fourteen years in power, Rishi Sunak announced at the Conservatives’ party conference that the big, bold idea for the future was the same kind of ban — one that creates two different tiers of consumer rights. It’s a legacy policy alright: a policy so nannying in nature, Labour can’t help but see it through.

Biden is in a slightly different position: his failed grasp for power has come and gone. But the parallels don’t stop there. Like Britain, America has a very clear story to tell about smoking — in both countries’ cases, a spectacular fall in the smoking rate, as residents have decided on their own accord to abandon the unhealthy habit.

According to the American Lung Association, smoking rates have plummeted for adults, from a peak of 42 percent in the mid-1960s to 11.6 percent in 2022. This reflects the British experience, where smoking fell to 11.9 percent in 2020 — in both countries, hitting the lowest proportion since records began. The decline in underage smokers in America is also remarkable, down to 3.8 percent last year, from a peak of 36.4 percent in the late 1990s. It’s a story that seems to only be getting better. In the last five years, "smoking rates have fallen 57 percent among youth," according to the Association, down "from 8.8 percent in 2017."

Why, then, the push to infringe on lifestyle freedoms for adults, when all the numbers are going in the right direction? Looking at Biden’s four years in office, the thought occurs: if not smoking, what legacy is there to boast about? Near-double digit inflation? A botched, lethal withdrawal from Afghanistan? A crushing defeat for his party on election day? The post-Covid era has not been kind to incumbents, and with price spirals and cost-of-living crises largely defining these administrations. So it’s not surprising that leaders have been grappling to come up with something, anything, that can mark their time in office, unrelated from what they actually oversaw, something they can spin as noble and "right."

Of course lofty dreams of legacy rarely pan out as intended. Indeed, attempts to fix "bad behavior" that’s already correcting itself can backfire spectacularly — as has been pointed out by consumer choice advocates, who note that the already-lucrative black market for cigarettes is only going to get bigger if the government pushes through these new rules. 

But never mind the consequences, it’s the thought that counts. And it seems Biden can’t help but flirt with the idea of tinkering with personal liberty just a little bit more before he goes.