Growing up in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Aitana V. remembers being a young girl and not seeing anyone from her school or in her community smoke. If the topic of cigarettes even came up, “we talked about it as something horrible because we were little,” she remembers. But when Aitana’s parents moved the family to Spain in 2020, the teen was confronted with a different reality. Whereas smoking was largely off the radar for New York City teenagers, Aitana found that in Europe, “there’s a lot of smoke culture, especially at an earlier age.”

Now 16 and rounding out the remainder of her high school years in Barcelona, Aitana travels home often. It was during one of those recent trips back home that the native New Yorker came face-to-face with a surprising shift. “A lot of teens are [smoking],

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