On city streets and outside bars, cigarettes and e-cigs are back in hand. On screen, Timothée Chalamet and Bradley Cooper light up, while “cigfluencers” glamorize smoking online.

With little oversight of social media promotions, the April closure of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, and the September end of the 13-year “Tips From Former Smokers” campaign — smoking’s comeback seems inevitable.

Hollywood is a big driver of the current curiosity about smoking. In 2024, nine out of the 10 films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture featured tobacco imagery such as cigarettes or smoking.

But public health leaders say imagery aside, smoking among the general population is not on the rise.

“Adult smoking is just shy of 11%, a remarkable achievement from the 50% of the population that smoked in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Brian King, executive vice president of U.S. tobacco control programs at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Just 1.7% of high schoolers smoke, King notes.

“The decline in cigarette smoking is one of the greatest health achievements of the past century,” King stresses. “It’s at a 75-year low for adults and a 25-year low for youths. The drops are the result of the evidence-based strategies we know work: cigarette taxes, health campaigns, cessation programs, and smoke-free policies.”

Still, 30 million U.S. adults smoke, and the tobacco industry is quick to adapt — rolling out e-cigarettes, nicotine pouches, and other products to dodge regulation and target new generations, even children.

“The industry spends $8 billion a year, or $1 million an hour on advertising,” King points out.

Big Tobacco’s aim is to “glamorize and normalize an addiction, to make tobacco and nicotine use normal, desirable, and acceptable,” says Dr. Howard K. Koh, former U.S. assistant secretary for health and a board member of the Truth Initiative, which was founded in 1999 after the tobacco industry’s $206 billion settlement with the U.S. and 46 states.

The industry should not be able to get away with a “game of public health whack-a-mole,” King believes.

“The industry is relentless,” Koh agrees. Even if vaping is less harmful than smoking, e-cigarettes still deliver nicotine — something Big Tobacco is counting on. Koh says campaigns to dissuade people from smoking especially need to educate children, in order to sustain headway against the well-funded industry.

“If we focus on children and help them to be nicotine-free, that would lead to real progress,” Koh believes.

That the industry’s tactics remain the same as 70 years ago — and still work on some — may be the most astonishing part of smoking’s seeming revival.

It also underscores how important it is for anti-smoking campaigns to continue, and for people to understand the real cancer risks.

As Kathy Crosby, CEO of the Truth Initiative, puts it: “We’re marketed to nonstop — but when it comes to deadly and addictive products like tobacco, we must push back. Young people today face products that are bigger, stronger, and cheaper, than ever before. We must be vigilant in protecting this next generation as well as providing free and science-backed support to anyone looking to quit.”