I have never smoked a cigarette so I got no dog in that fight, but I have long wondered - 'why not just ban the things?'
I get the whole libertarian aspect of it, people should be allowed to be as stupid as they want, and they are only hurting themselves, hype about second- and even third-hand smoke aside, but we are penalizing tobacco companies more and more each year and have created an entire industry funded by the tobacco industry and that industry exists to demonize tobacco. Now they have even extended their reach to smoking cessation products like e-cigarettes.
Just ban them. An Australian researcher throws off all pretense about outreach and lobbies for that very thing, even going so far as to advocate nationalizing the industry and devoting it to getting rid of smoking - as if the government would get rid of something they get revenue from. If people have choice, they will choose wrong, this lecturer seems to believe - if that sounds like Meryl Streep's social authoritarian character in "The Giver", well, it's not just fiction. Or maybe we should place a cap on how much companies can charge.
It's all meant to starve an industry slowly so no one gets stigmatized for being a health mullah, a fundamentalist who wants to make all non-believers suffer. When even non-partisan non-smokers think the evangelical zeal is too much, the issue has stopped being about health and is more about social engineering.
