Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes walking the streets of New York City in the last half-decade is familiar with the assault on their olfactory organs to which they must consent. Everywhere you go, New York is permeated by the distinct odor of marijuana.

Many are offended by the scent and freely complain about the lack of discipline marijuana smokers observe now that no legal consequences are associated with its use. Still more subordinate their disdain to the ideological goal of decriminalizing the intoxicant. But no one pretends that the pungent fragrance isn’t ubiquitous.

This condition has led to a bizarre contradiction. The city that has become so accommodating toward marijuana smokers is at the same time inordinately hostile toward tobacco smokers—and, indeed, even virtually odorless nicotine replacement therapies like personal vaporizers. Why does this contradiction persist? We now know the answer, thanks in part to a massive wildfire in Quebec that has subsumed the mid-Atlantic in a cloud of suffocating smog: New Yorkers don’t even remember what tobacco is.

“Air Quality Worsens Across New York With Smoke That ‘Smells Like Cigars,’” read the headline gracing the top of the New York Times website on Wednesday.

In Binghamton, about 60 miles south, Mike Hardiman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the city “looks like Mars” and “smells like cigars.”

The virtue of this quote is in its rhyme scheme, not its descriptive power. The smoke presenting northeasterners with unprecedented air-quality issues does not, in fact, smell like cigars. It smells like a forest fire. If the Times’ scribes pair their scotch with burning lumber and leaf litter, no wonder they’ve become so antagonistic toward tobacco smoking. Either that or they import only the finest gold leaf over which they roast marshmallows.

Either way, someone here is deeply confused, and it’s not cigar smokers.