News Summary

• Despite the health risks, they’re an antidote to the stress of everyday life.
• As of 2022, only 14.6 percent of the adult U.S. population identified as smokers.
• Decades of public-health campaigns, stricter regulations on tobacco advertising, higher sales taxes have turned lighting up from ubiquitous to niche.
• Despite the habit’s many complications, cigar smoking is an indulgence that eases my stress, helps me focus, and provides me with satisfaction.“Cigars are the perfect literary drug,” the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides said in his 2011 “The Art of Fiction” interview with The Paris Review.