What;s wrong with kids these days?
Sometimes it's fun to revert to spazzed-out-six-year-old temper tantrum kinds of behavior like this -- NO! I DON'T WANNA! YOU CAN'T MAKE ME! I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT! -- but just for kicks, let's put our grownup thinking caps on (have you got one?) and consider your position. Chewing gum, coffee, beer, and hard booze are on the very long list of things which, when thoughtfully used as intended, do not kill or maim the user. Tobacco's not on that list because when used as intended, it kills half its users and maims and disfigures many of the other half, similarly (but to a greater degree) than yesterdays' lawnmowers and power saws and kids' bicycles and automobiles.
Your argument jumps the shark right about here. With smoking banned in just about all public places, banning cigarettes basically only keeps people from hurting themselves. As you said, tobacco is hurting its
users. And as you said, no user with basic literacy or common sense has any excuse for believing that the cigarettes aren't incredibly dangerous. For that reason, banning cigarettes is not even remotely the same thing as unsafe cars, or environmental poisoning or your other examples.
Where does
that slippery slope lead? By that rationale, shouldn't we ban drag racing? skydiving? 4-wheelers? Tattoos? Guns? (talk about a product that's dangerous when used as intended!) Old cars? Forks? Ladders?
I do believe the government has a responsibility and jurisdiction to warn people "Hey, that's going to kill you if you keep it up." but if they're not harming anyone else, then the power of the state ends right there.
You can go on about the cost of medical care for smokers and all of that (even though they generate
hella lotta tax revenue), but where does it balance against the cost of the police and the prisons and covert military actions and the zillions of hours of $$$ time wasted by the legal system to put said users in said prisons, and the havoc wreaked by the other criminals that the system no longer has the time or capacity to prosecute or punish. Then there's the empowerment and enrichment of dealers with a new, previously legal product to sell, and the difficult to quantify cost of the erosion of civil rights in the name of fighting the
war on drugs. To say nothing of the kids killed in drive-by crossfire or Marine war heroes killed in no-knock raids when the police got the apartment number wrong.
Every time we try banning things people want to
do to themselves, we end up costing ourselves a lot of money, throwing good people away in prisons and enriching a typically violent criminal class that then corrupts our legal and political system with their ill-gotten gains.
Compare the NHTSA and EPA results with the National Office of Drug Control Policy, and see what it looks like.
Even though there are record numbers of cars on the roads, highway deaths are at an all-time low, ditto pollution generated per gallon of fuel. Fuel consumption isn't at an all-time low, but 500 hp supercars get the same mileage as 70s gas-sippers.
However, the War on Drugs has given us crack, meth, an undeclared war in Columbia, the highest prison population of any country on Earth, a hopelessly clogged legal system, and we've got a worse drug problem than we started with. EDIT: Oh, and we're out a trillion dollars for our efforts.
Meanwhile, through education and heavy taxation, smoking has declined massively in the past thirty years, while generating billions in tax revenue. EDIT: And by massively, I mean by 50%!!