Yeah, fair comment. You may be absolutely right. I feel like tobacco could potentially be eliminated easier than other drugs though, since it's not really intoxicating and its popularity is on the wane. Would there be a big black market for it that there isn't already (bootleg cigs to avoid taxes)
Once something is prohibited it increases in allure.
You can imagine, for example, young adults hearing stories from older people about how when they were young they could smoke and buy tobacco, "unlike you youngsters today", leaving them feeling like they are being denied a pleasurable vice, or a rite of passage or however they choose to see it. Suddenly the older people who can still buy tobacco have a ready market of younger people and teens wanting to buy off them, to give this mysterious thing they are banned from buying, a go. And then the gangs move in...
I'm not a smoker (haven't been for decades) so I'm not pro-tobacco or anything. But we've seen the vast expenditure in time, money, manpower and opportunities lost that have resulted from various prohibitions, with very little dent in the actual availability and use of said products, thanks to the systems of suppply and dealing set up by criminal enterprises.
It just seems retrograde to add another product line to that.
Discouraging smoking can only really work by making it dull and boring and anti-social and ruinously expensive. Prohibit it and it becomes cool and edgy and underground - and affordable again.
