The universe is expanding, but into what? An equally inscrutable mystery is: What is Altria, and why is it issuing gaseous pronouncements?

An Altria subsidiary is Philip Morris, which sells lots of cigarettes. Reluctantly. Sort of (read on). It is the largest domestic manufacturer, selling almost half of the cigarettes Americans buy. Driving through Richmond on I-95, you pass Philip Morris’s manufacturing center, which has a tower emblazoned with familiar fonts used for cigarette brands such as Marlboro and Benson & Hedges.

But Altria and its spin-off Philip Morris International have been running peculiar full-page — what? Ads? Not exactly. These word-mists in major newspapers say:

“From tobacco company to tobacco harm reduction company . . . moving adult smokers away from cigarettes . . . towards less harmful choices.” Using “more inclusive” approaches and a “fierce commitment to science” as a “global community” transcending “provincial thinking,” Altria and PMI are making “smoke-free products that eliminate combustion,” products that “are not risk-free and deliver nicotine, which is addictive” but are preferable to continued smoking.

Their rhetoric is, unfortunately, not eccentric: Today, many corporations slather their business calculations with a syrup of fashionable blather. By the time this geyser of corporate-gush concludes, no progressive trope has been unused: Ending “exclusionary policies” will ameliorate “climate change” and “institutionalized inequity.” PMI wants to achieve “a smoke-free future” by selling noncombustible tobacco products — e-cigarettes. PMI and Altria rightly resent those who insist that only zero-risk products are virtuous alternatives to the known high risks of cigarettes.

The behavior of many millions of Americans is generating an ocean of data that can be acquired no other way — data about harm-reduction from smoke-free, non-combustion products. Do they, over time, wean smokers off cigarettes? Or do they, particularly with flavors that delight the young, become a gateway to cigarettes? We will find out, unless government regulations truncate the experiment.

Regulating tobacco — a legal product that is harmful when used as intended, and marketed with heavily regulated advertising — is problematic. Democracy assumes a certain threshold of personal responsibility, individual rationality and the efficacy of information. But four centuries after King James I (1566-1625) issued his “Counterblaste to Tobacco,” many millions have not got the message.

Covid-19 has quickened interest in public health policies, including this: The most efficient thing government does, in terms of social benefits per dollar spent, is disseminate information — about the dangers of smoking, the benefits of seat belts, prudent dietary habits, etc.

In television’s early days, the sponsor of NBC’s “Camel News Caravan” required that anchor John Cameron Swayze have a lit Camel cigarette constantly in view. In 1964, the U.S. surgeon general announced what had been common knowledge long before a character in a 1906 O. Henry short story used common slang for cigarettes: “Say, sport, have you got a coffin nail on you?” That inhaling smoke from a burning plant is unhealthy was clear to King James I — Britain’s coffers would soon bulge with tobacco earnings from its Virginia colony — who denounced tobacco as “harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.” That tobacco is addictive also has long been known. In 1845, John Quincy Adams, then 78, said, “In my early youth I was addicted to tobacco.”

Yet in 2020, year one of a respiratory illness pandemic, smoking, which is still the nation’s foremost cause of preventable death (it has taken many more lives than all U.S. wars combined) increased: For the first time in 20 years, cigarette sale rose (to 203.7 billion). In January, the New York Times’s John Ortved wrote a darkly hilarious report on young renegade smokers, such as the Columbia University pre-med student who declined to be identified lest her career in medicine be affected. Another young woman said that “hot guys that I’m into” consider smoking (oxymoron alert) “Grunge sophisticated.” She evidently does not subscribe to the axiom that kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.

But an ingenious public service ad in California’s late 20th century antismoking campaign said: “I tried it twice and I, ah, got all red in the face and I couldn’t inhale and I felt like jerk and, ah, never tried it again, which is the same as what happened to me with sex.” The percentage of Californian smoking declined 17 percent in three years.

In the mid-1950s, nearly half of American adults smoked. Today, one-eighth do. The reduction is stunning; the persistence of 1 in 8 is more so. In the mid-1950s, smoking was a marker of sophistication and élan. Today, it is déclassé. Quite a change for a nation the father of which was an aristocratic tobacco farmer.