You ironically found yourself pointing out something valid. Banning companies from putting addictive substances into everyday products has always been a good idea (Meth in Cheerios, no thx). Banning an individual from choosing, by their own free will, to make a bad decision that doesn’t do any great harm to anyone else… is oppression my guy.
There’s a big difference between banning addictive industries and oppression. There’s a big difference between ‘a government not letting people do something’ and ‘oppression’. There might be a case that this way of eliminating tobacco usage, by just making an addictive substance illegal, can be cruel if there isn’t adequate social support alongside it, but banning smoking by itself isn’t cruel, malicious or arbitrary.
I think there are some reasonable arguments for not criminalizing tobacco, and that this is a silly ineffective way to approach a chemically-and-socially addictive issue, but it is harmful to health for the user and others, society and therefore economics. And this can’t be rationalized away by ‘it’s someone’s own free will’ when it’s chemically-addictive, socially-ingrained and still being marketed to vulnerable teens. And, keep in mind, the medical costs of this are socialised, so it’s not like the person smoking pays for all the consequences. It’s a systematic, non-trivial problem that significantly affects people who do not choose to partake.
With all that said, fuck the ‘war on drugs’ style of criminalization. It just creates an illegal market and fills prisons, and in some countries with a similar system to the US, creates a legalized form of mass slave labour.
