Opinion piece: Barbara Lee
It started as a perfectly ordinary conversation among friends — the kind where you talk about small, everyday kindnesses. Someone mentioned giving spare change to a homeless man outside the supermarket. Someone else said they always buy food instead, because at least then they know the help is going somewhere useful. And then one friend, a smoker, casually mentioned that she doesn't think twice about handing over a cigarette if someone asks her for one.
That's when things got interesting. Within seconds, someone pushed back: that's not ethical. And just like that, what started as a lighthearted chat turned into one of those conversations you keep thinking about long after it's over.
The case against the cigarette
The argument is straightforward enough. Smoking is harmful. It's addictive. It does nothing to improve someone's situation — in fact, it actively reinforces a dependency that costs money and damages health. If the whole point of helping someone is to bring them closer to a better, more stable life, then a cigarette seems like a strange tool to reach for.
It's hard to argue with that logic on the surface. And yet, something about it felt uncomfortable to me — not wrong exactly, but incomplete.
Who decides what "good help" looks like?
One friend put it differently. When you give something to someone, she said, you're not trying to educate them. You're responding to a specific request, in a specific moment. You don't have the right to decide what counts as a "good" or "bad" choice in another adult's life — even if their circumstances are far harder than yours.
The moment we attach conditions to our help, we're quietly establishing a hierarchy: we become the ones who know better.
And honestly? I think there's something real in that. How genuine is an act of generosity when it comes with an unspoken set of rules? "I'll help you — but only if you use it in a way I approve of." What makes it more uncomfortable is the double standard buried inside it: I, as someone with a stable home and income, am perfectly free to smoke if I choose. But the person sitting on that doorstep doesn't get the same autonomy — simply because their life is harder than mine.
But a cigarette isn't a basic need
Still, it's difficult to ignore the other side. A cigarette is not food. It's not warm clothing. It's not medical care. It's something that causes long-term harm. Which raises a harder question: does every act of help have to make sense in the long run?
Because if we're honest with ourselves, sometimes the long run isn't what matters most. Sometimes it's the moment itself. A cigarette won't solve anything — it won't find someone a place to sleep, or help them get a job, or improve their health. But in those few minutes, it might offer something else entirely: a small relief, a familiar routine, a feeling that someone isn't questioning your right to exist.
That's not nothing.
There's no clean answer — and that's the point
I don't think there's one correct answer to whether giving a cigarette to someone in need is ethical. What I do think is that every decision like this is a delicate balancing act — somewhere between common sense, empathy, and your own values.
What the conversation really revealed wasn't a verdict on cigarettes. It was how differently we all think about what helping actually means — and how much of our "help" is quietly shaped by our own comfort, our own judgments, and our own need to feel like we did the right thing.
Maybe the most honest thing any of us can do is sit with that discomfort, rather than reaching for an easy answer.
