The cigarette industry is a very well known evil, for sure. I am not defending them per se, I’m arguing that in a free society we should have the freedom to make bad decisions. Cigarettes have a very well known long term health risk and are addictive. Key here is that the risks are highly publicized and occur gradually. There’s time for someone to try smoking, decide they made a bad decision, and quit without adding any further risk to the risk that they’ve taken up to that point.
Lots of products that are allowed to be sold are known to be bad for you. If the government bans everything that presents a risk over time or with heavy use I worry that people will stop thinking for themselves as much. “This product was not banned by the government therefore it must be safe.”
Now to be clear I’m not recommending that anyone should be smoking. I’ve never smoked, the risks were clearly conveyed to me in school and are printed on every pack of cigarettes and I don’t think it’s worth it. I also think that if a product has a high chance of injuring someone right away or in the short term, like if it’s known to explode and kill someone since it’s badly built, or if it has a choking hazard for kids and is intended for kids, those should be recalled and fixed or banned.
I may be off-base here but that’s my reasoning. Unrelated to reasoning, my emotional response to seeing this headline is that I feel like once the government bans cigarettes they’re going to start banning all sorts of other products since they’ve been emboldened to take more control over people’s lives. That’s a slippery slope fallacy though so it’s not a good argument.
Long as they’re treating them equally and doing the same for both I get the idea behind it and don’t mind it. In fact I could see companies having an email preferences page and a list of holidays they market for and you being able to opt out of any particular one you’d like. Not big into Halloween? Hate Valentine’s Day? Opt out.