For decades the Federal government has insisted they want fewer Americans to smoke but recent regulatory missteps have instead led to worries by health professionals that policies designed to create winners and losers in the smoking cessation market instead keep people addicted to tobacco.

There has always been a bit of inconsistency in how smoking cessation has been handled; raising taxes on cigarettes, for example, unfairly impacts poor people, and those taxes fund government services, making the government more reliant on the industry they say they want to make smaller. Smoking public service announcements are a billion-dollar industry, all relying on money from Big Tobacco they say they oppose. 

Another perception is that large pharmaceutical companies may be lobbying to accomplish through government fiat what they cannot do in the marketplace - get rid of competitors to gums and patches such as "e-cigarettes".

Writing in The American Spectator, American Council on Science and Health Executive and Medical Director Dr. Gil Ross details the current political, cultural and public health landscape and what progress we are making toward ending cigarette smoking forever.