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+1

"Tobacco has made a small number of people incomprehensibly rich, to the great detriment of humanity."

incredible isn't it how we still allow manufacturers to sells products (at considerable profit) like this that have been proven to make people ill, or at worse, die.

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You would have to take a lot of products off the market if the fact that they can make people sick or kill people were the only criterion for doing so. Yes, cigarettes are a particularly dangerous combination: habit forming, enormous long-term harm, little short-term harm, etc. On the other hand, everyone who smokes knows that smoking is bad for them -- we have had a nationwide campaign to educate people, cigarette packs must have warnings of all sorts, cigar boxes and tubes come with warnings, and we show plenty of TV ads about the danger. I suspect that banning cigarettes would do little to prevent people from smoking them; you would just see an underground cigarette trade, and attempting to crack down on it would be as destructive as the rest of the war on drugs.

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