As American cities enacted indoor anti-smoking laws, smokers responded by smoking outside. If from now on, we are wearing masks outside --- smoking becomes more inconvenient and fewer people will smoke. How much future mortality could be avoided by a reduction in smoking? The CDC claims that smoking causes 480,000 deaths a year in the U.S. From a rational addiction standpoint, will fewer young people start smoking?
An alternative hypothesis is that the COVID-19 crisis creates anxiety and stress and increases one's propensity to smoke. Thus, this is an interesting topic for new empirical work documenting how different people respond to the same macro shock.
Some evidence reports that sales are rising.