Until I moved to Austria, the idea of climbing a mountain in order to have a cigarette at the top had never occurred to me. By the time I did move there, to the outskirts of Vienna in 2006, I was a father. A popular weekend activity for my family, sometimes with friends, was to go up the mountain closest to our house. At the top of the mountain was an Austrian Alpine Club hut that operated as a restaurant during the day. We typically had lunch there and then hiked back down, playing hide and seek in the forest with our children. In the winter, when there was enough snow, we did it on skis or pulled our kids on sleds. It was lovely. But what surprised me, when we first moved there, was that the hut itself was filled with smoke.

Austria, according to the latest statistics available, ranks first among industrialized countries in a way that few people are proud of: 36.3 percent of adults smoke on a daily basis, just ahead of Greece, at 35 percent, and well ahead of the United States, at 17.5 percent. Indeed, 60, percent of Austrians in the 20–50 age bracket describe themselves as occasional smokers, the highest in the world. Why Austria? I don't know. The country, like most others, has been taxing cigarettes extremely heavily as a way of discouraging smoking. A pack of Marlboros will cost you more than $5 in Austria, comparable with most other Western European countries and most American states (New York and a few other states tax at a much more higher rate) and a lot more than most Eastern European countries (in Poland, a pack of smokes will cost $3 and in the Ukraine $1.50).

But, until recently, Austria didn't have or didn't enforce many other laws for smoking, such as regulations against smoking in indoor public spaces or against cigarette advertising.