Cigarettes are a good example of a cultural paradigm shift that happened quite quickly (at least in the UK, US and Australia). Perhaps younger people don't realise that just a few decades ago cigarettes and cigarette advertising was
everywhere.
But it wasn't taxes that squashed cigarettes usage. Cigarettes were already taxed heavily, but that didn't put people off. What squashed it was marginalising it. It was banned from indoor places and many public spaces. They were no longer allowed to advertise, even to the extent that they can't display fancy logos and colours on the boxes. It was essentially stripped of all glamorous elements and was laid bare as the unhealthy, disgusting and archaic habit that it is.
Advertising and marketing are extremely powerful and therefore can be extremely evil. Cigarettes were the most perfectly marketable product of the tobacco industry. The way they looked and felt was so perfectly appealing. It's easy to look back and see the marketing as evil now. What's not so easy is looking forward.
I want to see the same treatment applied to other harmful things. Why are fast food companies allowed to advertise everywhere? Obesity is essentially food addiction. Nobody wants to be obese. They are obese because they are addicted to food. But we still allow fast food advertising everywhere. It's nothing short of exploitative.
Car companies are allowed to market their vehicles as an extension of one's self. So they can produce ridiculously overweight and overpowered vehicles by appealing to the insecure male part of the population with names like "Ram", "Viper" and "Raptor". Large vehicles need to be strictly utilitarian. Need a large vehicle? Fine, but it's going to look like a white box and be called something like "Cargo Master" or maybe just "Van size 2". Also they should be banned from car parks and smaller roads that are designed for cars or smaller vehicles.