A pack of cigarettes can be purchased in the UAE for two dirhams. Or about 50 U.S. cents.

Marlboros can be had for Dh9 — about $2.50 — per pack.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that cigarette smoking is a significant issue in the UAE. The World Health Organization puts the level of regular smokers, among boys from 13 to 15 years old at 21.3 percent.

And a particularly alarming trend:

The same study found that 9 percent of girls the same age also are regularly smokers. The alarming part of that is this: The overall rate of smoking among women in the UAE is only 2.4 percent. So girls in their early teens are smoking at nearly four times the rate of older women.

I have, of course, never understood the appeal. Especially in the time since smoking was authoritatively linked to cancer and heart disease, and that was 50 years ago.

Why do teens start? Because it makes them look older, somehow? Or tough? Or rebellious?

Who among us has not actually heard smokers say, “It gives me something to do with my hands”?

Others seem to smoke mostly because they believe the nicotine helps curb their appetite and keeps their weight down. But those are adults, mostly. Not silly 14-year-olds.

Anyway, smoking shisha is a very Emirati thing.

(Though it has been found that consuming tobacco via water pipe is quite harmful to health, contrary to popular belief in the Arab street, and that an hour’s puffing of shisha puts as much tar in the lungs as 600 cigarettes. Yet, shisha usage is up, too. as The National reported last month under the headline: The Middle East’s Favorite Toxin.)

Back to cigarettes. They were rarely used by Emiratis a generation ago. Now …

As in many world cities, the air in the UAE’s big cities is anything but pure. The problem does not stem from heavy industry or the burning of coal … it is the grit in the air from blowing sand, and the fairly significant contribution of motor vehicles, many of which spew ugly exhaust fumes.

To take up cigarette smoking in this environment is just crazy and local medical people are alarmed at the rise in figures.

Being alarmed and making progress against this is difficult. Cigarette smoking is down significantly in the U.S. since the Surgeon General’s report of half a century ago.

But it wasn’t the idea of lung cancer and early death that reversed the tide, it was the indignation of non-smokers, who never liked being around smokers, and decided they would not take it any more, that made smoking practically shameful.

The same sort of societal rejection and marginalization probably will be needed here to reverse an unfortunate trend.

It also might help for the country to tax cigarettes. Twenty of them for 50 cents makes them too affordable.