Smokers are less likely to be obese and vehicle crashes are still a leading cause of death. Seems like this is more about pushing morals than promoting long and worthwhile lives.
Yes, but if you have a choice between being a normal body weight and being a non-smoker, you should choose the latter. In fact, the effect is so strong that it has a distorting effect on the correlation between low body weight and health. If you don't filter smokers out of your analysis, it can look like being overweight is not bad for you, or even slightly positive. See e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27423262/
> Seems like this is more about pushing morals than promoting long and worthwhile lives.
Maybe it's both?
Just speculating, but might be that the NZ govt could be willing to ban the dependency on something that is imported so that people will have more money to spend in local products, hence fueling their economy.
Smoking is expensive because of local consumption and sin taxes.