Office worker Kim wanders through alleyways between buildings during lunch breaks, searching for a spot to smoke. The smoking booths near his office are always packed, and most streets he walks are designated as non-smoking zones.
According to the Seoul Metropolitan Government on the 7th, the city has about 303,000 non-smoking zones, but only 136 public outdoor smoking booths. That means roughly 10,000 people share a single smoking booth. Seoul's smoking population is estimated at about 1.3 million, calculated by applying last year's smoking rate of 14 percent to the city's registered population of approximately 9.3 million.
The disparity across districts is extreme. Seocho-gu has the most with 39 booths, while five districts including Mapo, Dongjak, and Jongno have just one each. Eleven districts including Seodaemun, Songpa, and Yangcheon have no public smoking booths at all. In Songpa-gu, home to 650,000 residents, and Gangseo-gu, with a population in the 500,000 range, there is no public facility where smoking is legal.
Non-smoking zones, meanwhile, have expanded rapidly. Seoul's non-smoking zones grew 3.8-fold from about 79,000 in 2012 to some 303,000 over 14 years. All restaurants were designated non-smoking zones in 2015, and from December 2018, areas within 10 meters of kindergarten and daycare facility boundaries were included.
In May 2023, the range was expanded to 30 meters, and from August last year, areas within 30 meters of elementary, middle, and high school boundaries were newly designated. As rooftop smoking areas in buildings near schools were shut down one after another, a balloon effect of street smoking by office workers emerged simultaneously across the city.
Smokers' strongest complaint concerns the gap between tobacco tax burdens and available infrastructure. A 4,500 won pack of regular cigarettes carries a total of 3,323 won in taxes and levies — including a 1,007 won tobacco consumption tax, 594 won individual consumption tax, 443 won local education tax, 841 won national health promotion levy, and 409 won value-added tax. That is 73.8 percent of the price. A 24 won waste disposal charge and 5 won tobacco production stabilization fund are also included.
The scale is considerable. Government tax revenue from tobacco surged 50.4 percent from 6.99 trillion won ($4.9 billion) in 2014 to 10.52 trillion won in 2015 right after the cigarette price hike, and has remained in the 12 trillion won range since. Of this, the national health promotion levy imposed directly on smokers amounts to about 3 trillion won a year. But the health care sector has consistently pointed out that only a single-digit percentage of this levy is spent on smoking cessation programs. That is why smokers ask, "Where does my money go?"
District-level responses are mixed. Seongdong-gu operates 14 smart smoking booths, installing booths equipped with air purification systems in high-traffic areas such as Wangsimni Station. Seocho-gu invested 100 million won in January this year to install an open-type smoke-extraction facility near Gangnam Station and plans to add two more. Gangnam-gu, in contrast, has no smoking booths of its own, and the 11 districts with zero booths have announced no plans to install any.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government is taking a cautious stance. The city said, "Based on WHO recommendations and examples from countries leading in smoking cessation, expanding pure non-smoking zones without smoking facilities and reducing the smoking rate itself is the most desirable policy direction," placing greater weight on lowering smoking rates than on installing new smoking booths. However, this policy stance has effectively left smokers to smoke on the streets, creating a contradiction in which secondhand smoke exposure for non-smokers is also growing.
Experts say legal smoking spaces must be institutionally expanded to reduce the conflict of rights between smokers and non-smokers. Academic institutions including the Korea Center for Tobacco Control Research argue that with the number of smokers still exceeding 10 million, expanding non-smoking zones without adding infrastructure only amplifies the balloon effect. Critics say the current structure, in which enforcement and smoking areas have lost balance, is harming both smokers and non-smokers.
