The amount of damage that cigarette smoking causes is enormous and it's a huge burden on our medical industry and a huge cost to all of us. There is no doubt that antibiotics and pesticides in foods are also a huge problem and I don't think we need to chose between eradicating one or the other. There are huge corporate interests behind both that make it difficult to eradicate. Smoking is horrible for people though add to this the fact that the manufacturers directly market to young people, literally giving away their products to get people hooked and it gets even more despicable. It's the number one cause of preventable disease in the world. Number one. We spend billions of dollars in the US alone treating preventable diseases that are associated with smoking. I enjoy an occasional cigarette, I really do but smoking as a habit is horrendous for the individual and for society. I'd gladly see a world where they didn't exist at all.
Certainly, but obesity is a growing concern as well. I have no problem with people marketing food, but I do have a problem with things that are added to food, like sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. Smoking is not nearly as prevalent as it once was and it seems like it is still on the decline. The current burden on the medical industry is predominantly from older people who grew up before the dangers of smoking were confirmed or even acknowledged as fact. That is a huge difference from smokers who grew up after the fact. Furthermore, it really seems like pulmonary afflictions tend to be assumed to be caused by smoking rather than things like indoor air quality or fine particles in industrial settings and given the prevalence of smoking in the past, it makes sense. However, I don't see the issue of indoor air quality or even air quality in general being addressed except when it gets to be really terrible, as in the recent reportage of the smog in China. I'm not at all saying that smoking isn't bad and I'm not trying to minimize it, but I am saying that I think smoking has been a huge target for a long time and as such, has distracted people from other things that are worthy of consideration, which also affect the burden on the medical industry (like obesity). Just because a big target exists doesn't mean that it's the only target or that eliminating a large problem will be more advantageous than resolving numerous smaller problems. Edit: I should also say that one of the more interesting ideas that I've been exposed to via conflict resolution is the idea of fractionating, which essentially means breaking a larger issue down into smaller, more manageable components. I think it's very likely that by learning about effective ways to work with and around addictive things and behaviors, it might just so happen that a much more effective way of dealing with a large issue like smoking, might emerge. Certainly, stigmatizing people who smoke does not do this and in fact tends to inspire people who do smoke to get defensive about it, or to react emotionally rather than to understand the long term benefit of not smoking or participating in a technology that might help them to quit or perhaps reduce the possibility of tobacco related afflictions, or even lead to another technology that might make nicotine consumption as benign as caffeine consumption.