In an age where facts are routinely sacrificed on the altar of political expediency, the latest campaigns targeting premium cigars in Louisiana and Detroit offer a masterclass in emotional manipulation and flat-out misinformation in an effort to secure excessive government overreach. These are not well-meaning attempts to protect public health. They are strategic, ideologically motivated assaults on adult freedoms, free enterprise, and the cultural tradition of premium cigar consumption — one of the last bastions of legal, adult pastimes left unspoiled by what many see as an ever-developing nanny state.
Their playbook is simple: twist data, stoke fear, and conflate premium cigars with the real problems of other products.
Their endgame? Control.
If they can redefine premium cigars as a public health threat, they can regulate them out of existence, one bureaucratic mandate at a time.
It’s time to call out this campaign for what it is — a calculated, dishonest effort to expand regulatory power by demonizing a niche product one microaggression at a time.
Louisiana: A Manufactured Crisis
Let’s begin in Louisiana, where truth was not just bent but completely discarded during a legislative hearing on premium cigar taxation. An anti-tobacco activist, standing in front of lawmakers, claimed that “one million high school students in Louisiana smoke cigars annually.”
That’s not a misstatement — it’s statistical fiction. There aren’t one million high school students in the entire state of Louisiana. According to the Louisiana Department of Education, total public high school enrollment sits at around 250,000. When you include private, charter, and homeschool populations, you still fall dramatically short of one million. The statement wasn’t just wrong — it was a deliberate attempt to scare lawmakers into action with numbers that have no basis in reality.
The sad truth is that once such disinformation is introduced into the public record, it tends to linger. It informs policy debates, shapes headlines, and fuels legislation — all without ever being fact-checked by the very media outlets that pride themselves on calling out “misinformation.”
Worse still, national data resoundingly disproves the idea that youth are regularly using premium cigars. According to the FDA and NIH’s own Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, only 0.6% of youth ages 12–17 reported smoking traditional cigars (a category that includes premium cigars) in the past 30 days.
So where, exactly, is the youth epidemic? Where is the risk that justifies sweeping regulatory intervention?
It doesn’t exist.
Detroit: Billboards and Bogus Outrage
Meanwhile, in Detroit, the anti-cigar crusade took an even more theatrical turn. A coalition funded by the Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund launched a billboard campaign opposing a premium cigar lounge inside Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW). The imagery was designed to inflame, not inform — one billboard showed a child engulfed in smoke, gasping for breath, with text implying that the new lounge would expose children and other innocent travelers to toxic secondhand smoke.
This is propaganda, not public health communication.
For starters, as a rule, cigar lounges are not accessible to children. To take it a step further, cigar lounges located inside secure airport terminals are only accessible to ticketed passengers — typically those 21 and older. The simple truth is that children aren’t allowed.
These lounges are highly controlled environments, monitored and ventilated to a standard that exceeds many restaurants, offices, and public spaces. They are not the smoky backroom dens of the 1970s. They are clean, modern, well-regulated facilities designed with sophisticated HVAC and negative pressure systems that prevent smoke from seeping into surrounding areas.
Modern cigar lounges, especially those built in airports, routinely meet or exceed indoor air quality standards through advanced dual ventilation systems. These systems exchange indoor air several times an hour, ensuring that the air quality inside and outside the lounge remains within safe thresholds.
If you don’t want to be exposed to cigar smoke, don’t go in. But to suggest that a child is going to be choking on secondhand smoke from a lounge they cannot legally access, located beyond security, is nothing short of manipulative.
Who Are Premium Cigar Smokers, Anyway?
In order to fully understand the absurdity of the attacks on premium cigars, you have to understand who the typical consumer is.
Premium cigars are not impulse buys at gas stations designed to attract teenagers. They are handcrafted, whole-leaf tobacco products stored in humidors and priced as a premium and luxury experience. They are purchased in specialized lounges and tobacconists. And they are consumed — by and large — by adults over the age of 35, in moderation and with deliberation.
In fact, the PATH Study reveals that fewer than 7% of adult premium cigar users consume these products daily. The vast majority use them occasionally, often socially or during celebrations. We are not talking about addictive patterns here — we are talking about lifestyle choices.
What’s more, premium cigar lounges and tobacconists are often family-owned small businesses. They don’t have billion-dollar budgets to lobby Congress. They can’t cut checks to political PACs or flood the airwaves with counter-ads. And yet, these mom-and-pop establishments are being painted with the same brush as Big Tobacco.
The Real Agenda: Government Control Disguised as Concern
Here’s what this is really about: control. There are many hyper-progressive groups that have never met a legal product they didn’t want to regulate, tax, or outlaw altogether. Whether it’s sugary drinks, gas stoves, firearms, or cigars — the reflex is always the same. Frame the issue as a crisis, weaponize emotion, and ram through regulations that strip away freedom under the guise of “protecting the children.”
But there is no epidemic here. There is no youth usage crisis. There is no secondhand smoke apocalypse waiting to happen in airport terminals. What there is — clearly — is a movement to expand government control into every corner of adult life and every niche of the free market.
And the similar niche industries should be paying close attention. Because if they can succeed in regulating premium cigars — an overwhelmingly adult-only product, sold in controlled environments, with near-zero youth engagement — then there’s no limit to what they’ll come for next.
This is not about health. This is about power. And it’s about time we said so.
We Can — and Must — Push Back
Policymakers at the state and federal levels must reject the hysteria and insist on regulation grounded in fact, not fiction. That means looking at the data, acknowledging the negligible youth use of premium cigars, and understanding that properly ventilated lounges pose no threat to public health.
It also means acknowledging the fundamental right of adults to make legal, informed choices about what they consume. If we allow emotional manipulation and junk science to drive policy in this space, we’re not just hurting small businesses and adult consumers — we’re setting a dangerous precedent for how government can manipulate public health arguments to erode freedom.
We must stand firm. The government has no business banning or strangling a legal product that is responsibly enjoyed by consenting adults, simply because it fits a progressive narrative or serves a political agenda. The fight over premium cigars may seem like a niche issue, but it is emblematic of something much larger — the battle between freedom and overregulation, between truth and fearmongering, between the individual and the state.
We must choose freedom. We must choose facts. And we must say, without apology, that enjoying a premium cigar in a ventilated lounge is not a crime — it’s a choice. A legal, responsible, adult choice.
– Article contributed by the PCA Government Affairs team.