NYC’s most outspoken smokers’ rights activist keeps up fight by growing her own tobacco — and ignoring bans

She’s fired up — and still firing ’em up.

The city’s most outspoken smoker’s rights activist has turned to “civil disobedience” now that cigarette restrictions are the norm – puffing homegrown tobacco to keep her money out of the government’s hands.

“Would I rather be doing something else with my time? Yeah, but you gotta take a stand, and that’s my stand,” said Audrey Silk, 60, blowing smoke from the first of several cigarettes she inhaled during a recent visit to her Marine Park home from The Post.

“I will not give them my tax money. No, I will not,” she added. “They are using that money against me. They are using it to fund their anti-smoking ads.”

A retired NYPD cop who served out of the 67th Precinct during the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, Silk took up the cause of smokers’ rights in the early 2000s after smoking bans began to take effect across the city during former Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s first term.

“Oh, I hated that man,” Silk told The Post as she toiled away in her backyard where she grows tobacco in large pots. Her distaste for the former mayor became a motivator — and a mantra that still uses to this day.

“I still go ‘Screw you, Bloomberg. Screw you, Bloomberg’ under my breath to keep me going.”

She now calls her backyard “Screw You, Michael Bloomberg Gardens.” It’s where she grows her tobacco in 100 five-gallon buckets filled with soil.

NYC first banned smoking in most restaurants in 1995, but in 2002 Bloomberg banned smoking in bars and ushered in a new era of anti-smoking legislation. As of 2024, smoking is barred in most public places across the city, including all parks.

Silk viewed the bans as an attack on personal freedom, an outrageous government overreach that inspired her to start the advocacy group Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment (CLASH).

“It’s a legal product. This country was born on the back of tobacco farmers,” she said.

“The government has no right. ‘Oh we’re going to protect your health.’ By making you what? Eat your spinach? It’s the same concept.”

Through CLASH — which she said still has about 2,000 members today — Silk participated in smoking legislation hearings, organized rallies, wrote to newspapers and sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development over smoking bans in public housing. She even ran against her nemesis Bloomberg as a Libertarian for his third term.

“As far as the smokers rights thing goes, it doesn’t matter how old, or how long, or how much you smoke. It’s just that you should be left alone to be able to have a cigarette if you want one,” she said, adding there was an important difference between what she stands for and encouraging smoking.

“Pro-smoking means we encourage smoking. We don’t encourage it, we don’t discourage it. It’s just the rights of those who have chosen to smoke. It’s smokers rights, not pro-smoking,” she said.

“I defend the person who smokes one cigarette a month.”

Silk, has now taken focused her energy on rearing her precious crop of nicotiana tabacum.

“It’s like growing any other plant. You buy the seeds and start a tray in the house. When the leaves become the size of a dime, you transplant them out,” she said. “It takes about a month for it to go from the tray to the cup. And another month for the cup to the bucket. They mature sometime in August.

“As the leaves turn from a nice dark green to yellow, they are ready to be picked.”

“I do leaf by leaf,” she said, explaining how she picks the leaves from the stem and then hangs them to dry and cure.

Silk said she used to smoke Parliaments, but quit them to grow and roll her own tobacco about 10 years ago after Bloomberg hiked taxes on cigarettes. It’s a small act of rebellion, but she feels such actions are the only weapons the smokers resistance has left.

“Anti-smokers are incrementalists. They broil us like the frog in the pot,” she said, explaining she’d largely given up on the organized efforts of her past because she was over the “kangaroo court” hearings that came with “pre-ordained” anti-smoking legislation.

“I can’t reason with the irrational anymore so the only way to effect change is civil disobedience,” she said, “What’s the saying? Good people disobey bad laws. It’s ridiculous.

“It’s just smoking in the park and ignoring the policies as much as you can. Growing your own tobacco to avoid the taxes,” Silk said, adding that she also enjoys smoking in parks and airports alongside “No Smoking” signs.

“It’s definitely rebellious. When you see a fellow smoker it’s like ‘Yeah, you too, huh?'”

Further exasperating and confounding Silk are lawmakers’ willingness to legalize weed-laced gummies and candy-imitating products, while cracking down on menthol cigarettes and flavored nicotine — not to mention the marijuana smoke that has seemingly supplanted the scent of cigarettes across the city.

“The roles have reversed. The pot smokers are now the cigarette smokers and we’re the pot smokers trying to get it back.

“I am no longer actively fighting it,” she said. “Like I said, I can’t reason with the irrational.”

Silk isn’t afraid of the health risks associated with smoking, saying she wants to “live happily” rather then claw after longevity.

“Quantity would be nice but I’m not going to give up quality for quantity,” she said. “I’m accepting a risk.”

When she does go, though, Silk has no plans to let even death itself stop her from smoking.

“There’s already instructions to bury me with a carton of cigarettes at age 100.”