This makes about as much sense as the pro-gambling, pro-drug legalization crowd. There's a conflation of vice, regulation of vice, and the merits of engaging in vice that denies what this stuff does to your fellow American. I also used to erroneously think that a libertarian paradise full of vice was "freedom", until the reality became undeniable.
The reason so many people were addicted to cigarettes in the first place is Big Government. Tobacco was subsidized for many decades via New Deal programs, including and up to the time that people knew smoking killed.
The cigarette companies knew for decades before they were forced to acknowledge it that nicotine was an extremely addictive drug, and they continued to lie about it into the 1990s. Having a highly addictive drug that was subsidized by taxpayers pushed on young people to create lifelong smokers while the hospitals filled up with emphysema and lung cancer cases and cash was funneled to politicians to keep the con going isn't "freedom" in any sense of the word. The tobacco companies genetically altered the tobacco to be more addictive, then lied about it to Congress. When people tried to blow the whistle, they threatened them and sent Clinton-circle private detectives to dig up dirt on them. It was pure evil.
I can't fathom how you associate corrupt government-backed corporations marketing and selling deadly poison to young people and your fellow Americans with a free society. The only people I see smoking nowadays are hipsters in coffee shops with neck beards, promiscuous women, protesting leftists, and homeless people.
The conservatives I know and follow have maintained or rediscovered their commitment to health by exercise and consuming less corporate poison. I don't desire to see anyone smoking any more than I want to see people shooting up heroin on the street and hookers on every corner while poor people waste their paychecks on lottery tickets. Some may think cigarette butts in the street, used condoms in your yard from ubiquitous legal prostitution, the smell of weed smoke, and slot machines in convenience stores are freedom, but please keep that crap out of my community.
The perpetuation of vice isn't "freedom".
A fat, sick, broke, and debt-ridden populace smoking cigarettes, drinking plastic bottle vodka, and buying weekly or daily lottery tickets is a gift to the authoritarians. You can't fight for freedom when you're busy perpetuating your own addictions, addictions that are themselves pushed on a populace by the Deep State.
It also might help to ask yourself why a pro-Deep State, leftist rag like The Guardian is pushing this. I'll give you hint Jack, so pay attention; it ain't because they value your "freedom".
The perpetuation of property rights is freedom.
If the GenZers are lighting up, and that hastens a suppression of Marxist treatment of commercial property rights, then bravo.
Btw, the article is basically an elitist piece, imploring elders to become smoking poison pills. The Guardian remains staffed by idiots.