Smokers Are Cowards

There’s a guy at the warung kopi next to me. He lights a kretek and takes a long drag. Then he blows the smoke at the next table, where a young mother sits with her baby. The baby is maybe nine months old. Nobody at the warung thinks this is strange. The mother doesn’t even flinch.

This isn’t an essay about health. You already know cigarettes kill. It says so on the pack you bought. I want to talk about something else. About sixty-five million adults in this country choose to be cowards every time they light up, and I think that’s worth a few thousand words.

I.

The standard defence is “it’s my right”. OK, let’s see if that holds.

Rights end where they start harming someone else. You have the right to swing your fist. That right ends at the tip of someone else’s nose. Cigarettes don’t behave like a fist. The smoke you exhale doesn’t stay in your lungs. It goes into your wife’s lungs, your kid’s lungs, the lungs of a stranger sitting next to you on the angkot. This is not a metaphor.

In Indonesia, about 66% of teenagers aged 13 to 15 are exposed to secondhand smoke in enclosed public spaces. More than 57% are exposed inside their own homes. Every year, about 290,000 Indonesians die from tobacco. Over 52,000 of them never smoked a single cigarette in their lives. They died from someone else’s.

Fifty-two thousand. That’s not just a number. Those are people who never chose to smoke and still paid the bill. Picture a packed football stadium. Every year, that entire stadium dies. Imagine Kanjuruhan happening every day, in the same way, except none of the victims made the choice that killed them. Kanjuruhan happened because the police were cowards. These 52,000 happen because a lot of smokers are.

When a smoker says “my right”, what they’re actually saying is that he has the right to put carcinogens in someone else’s lungs without their consent. I don’t think that’s a right. More of slow-motion violence.

The structure is the cleanest moral hazard you can find in everyday life. Someone takes a small benefit for himself (the pleasure of the cigarette) and transfers a large cost to people who didn’t agree to anything (secondhand smoke, public health costs, sick children). They get the pleasure. Everyone else gets the cancer.

II.

“But smokers already pay the excise tax.”

This is the second-most-common defence. It’s also the easiest to take apart. Just look at the numbers.

In 2022, Indonesian cigarette excise revenue hit about Rp200 trillion. Big number. Officials and the tobacco industry love this number. They brag about it as a massive contribution to the economy, sometimes claiming it’s bigger than the combined contribution of all state-owned enterprises put together.

Now look at the other side of the ledger.

In 2017, a study cited by the Ministry of Health put macroeconomic losses from tobacco consumption at Rp431.8 trillion. That’s nearly three times the excise revenue collected that year, which was Rp147.7 trillion. Other research published in The Conversation estimated losses near Rp600 trillion in 2015, about four times the excise collected the same year.

These losses include direct healthcare costs and indirect costs from productive years lost to illness, disability, and early death. In 2022, BPJS Kesehatan spent about Rp24 trillion on eight catastrophic illnesses (heart disease, cancer, stroke, kidney failure, and a handful of others), most of them tied to smoking. Heart disease alone took Rp17.5 trillion across 20.5 million cases. BPJS’s 2023 deficit was Rp7.2 trillion, and tobacco-driven non-communicable diseases are a leading reason.

So for every rupiah a smoker pays in excise, the state has to spend two to four rupiah cleaning up after him. F*ck a contribution. That’s some debt nobody settles.

Who pays the gap? Not the smokers. Non-smokers do. Their BPJS contributions go toward treating people who chose to destroy their own bodies. The smoker has no skin in the game. That’s one of the reasons the word “coward” fits.

III.

This is the saddest part to write.

Indonesia has the highest child smoking prevalence in the world. More than 30% of Indonesian kids have reportedly tried a cigarette before they turned 10. About 5.9 million children aged 10 to 18 are already active smokers. Smoking among teenagers aged 15 to 19 jumped from 13.7% in 1995 to 37.3% in 2013.

At home, 78.4% of adults are exposed to secondhand smoke. Children spend most of their time at home, which means they become passive smokers from the day they’re born. Sometimes earlier than that. Research from the Indonesia Demographic Health Survey shows pregnant women exposed to secondhand smoke at home are more likely to deliver low-birth-weight babies. Infant exposure is also tied to higher rates of SIDS, stunting, acute respiratory illness, and early-onset cardiovascular disease.

Now ask yourself something. Where is the agency of these children?

Yes, quitting is neurologically hard. Yes, many smokers started young because of social pressure. Yes, agency is complicated. But the very thing is, the argument about agency runs in both directions. If you want sympathy for a smoker whose agency has been chemically eroded by addiction, you have to also account for the agency of a baby who has been forced to inhale his father’s smoke from day one. And that number is zero.

A smoker who lights up in the living room in front of his kids is not a victim of addiction. He has options. He can go outside. He can not light up in the room with his family. He can protect the people most dependent on him. Those are minimal choices. When he refuses them, “coward” starts to sound about right.

IV.

I’m using the word “coward” on purpose, and I want to defend the choice.

Indonesia has a strong cultural link between smoking and masculinity. Cigarettes are a marker of adulthood, of camaraderie, of being a real man. Cigarette ads, still everywhere because Indonesia is the only WHO member in Southeast Asia that hasn’t ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, do not make this association by accident. The branding consistently sells adventure, courage, freedom.

The reality of addiction is the opposite of that.

A man who can’t sit through a thirty-minute meeting without fidgeting about a cigarette is not free. They’re a slave to a chemical. Someone who spends Rp50,000 a day, Rp1.5 million a month, Rp18 million a year on something that is literally killing them while their family lives below the poverty line is not “manly”. The data on this isn’t flattering either. Per-capita cigarette spending is the second-largest expense category for Indonesian households, behind only prepared food and drink.

A recent Mensa Indonesia study turned up something interesting. Smoking prevalence among members is 10.8%, against a national rate of 28–40%. So roughly a quarter of the population average. The people who can most carefully evaluate long-term risk are the ones who smoke least.

This isn’t about insulting smokers’ intelligence. It’s about being honest that the decision to keep smoking, in an era when the harms are documented everywhere, is a decision driven by weakness. Not strength. Not conscious choice. Not courage. But the inability to sit with the short-term discomfort of stopping.

The standard justifications smokers reach for (“my grandpa smoked until he was ninety”, “we’re all going to die anyway”, “you only live once”) are survivorship bias dressed up as wisdom. They’re rationalzations. An honest rationalist would recognise them as motivated reasoning, finding reasons to defend a decision he’s already made instead of evaluating evidence before he makes it.

That is cowardice. Not physical weakness. Not even moral weakness, exactly. Just the unwillingness to be honest with yourself.

V.

It would be unfair, and intellectually lazy, to attack only individuals and leave the system alone.

Indonesia doesn’t just fail to protect its citizens from tobacco. Indonesia actively helps the tobacco industry. Some of the facts are unflattering enough that they’re hard to argue with. Indonesia is the only WHO member in Southeast Asia that hasn’t ratified the FCTC. It has the worst tobacco control score among the ten ASEAN nations, at 20.2, against Thailand’s 77.2 and Singapore’s 75.8. A pack of cigarettes in Indonesia is still about Rp19,000, against Rp67,000 in Malaysia and over Rp500,000 in Australia. Indonesia produced about 300 billion cigarettes in 2022. The industry employs about 6 million people from farm to factory.

Here is where the real complexity sits. Millions of people depend on this industry for their living, from tobacco farmers in Jember to factory workers in Kudus. Attacking cigarettes without acknowledging this is a form of intellectual privilege.

But acknowledging it does not justify the status quo. The fact that millions depend on the arms industry does not make weapons good. The fact that drug cartels employ thousands does not make narcotics a net positive. Economic dependence on an industry that kills 290,000 of its own citizens a year is not a defence. It’s a diagnosis.

This is another reason the word “coward” fits. Not just for the individual smoker, but for the nation as a whole. We know cigarettes kill. We’ve seen the data. We are too afraid of the economic and political backlash to make any real structural change. We chose this.

VI.

At the individual level, the solution is simple. Quit smoking.

Not “cut back”. Not “switch to vape”. Not “I’ll quit when I get married”. Just stop, dude.

The WHO reported that in 2018, 30.4% of Indonesian smokers tried to quit, but only 9.4% succeeded. That number is low. It’s not zero. Millions of Indonesians have quit. They didn’t quit because it was easy. They quit because they decided their health, their family, and their integrity were worth more than the small pleasure of a cigarette.

Former smokers who actually pulled it off are the bravest people in this whole conversation. They sat through grinding withdrawal, social pressure from friends who still smoked, and habits that were carved in by years of repetition. And they stopped anyway.

That is courage. Not lighting a cigarette on a motorbike. Not blowing smoke around at a warung. It’s sitting with discomfort, holding yourself back, and choosing not to push your risk onto the people you love.

At the system level, the answer is just as well-known. Ratify the FCTC. Ban tobacco advertising. Raise the excise tax significantly and consistently. Enforce smoke-free zones properly. Fund quit-smoking programmes publicly. Other countries have done all of these and seen smoking prevalence collapse.

One last data point. Countries that take tobacco control seriously have driven smoking prevalence below 15%. Australia is one of them. Indonesia is still at 28–35%. The gap is not about culture. It is not about destiny. The gap is about political and individual courage.

VII.

This essay isn’t here to judge. It’s here to challenge.

If you’re a smoker and you read this far, you’ve already shown something a lot of smokers don’t have. You sat through an argument designed to make you uncomfortable. That’s a real start.

Now the question is simple. Are you brave enough to quit?

Not tomorrow. Not next year. Not “when I’m ready”. Now.

Because every cigarette you light from this point on, after you’ve seen the numbers, after you’ve seen what it does to the people next to you, after you know that your excise tax doesn’t cover the cost, is no longer about rights or about choice.

It’s about whether you have the courage to live without that little stick of tobacco in your hand.

Or whether you don’t.