[Frondo]

What's the external cost of a smoker's choice to smoke, on shortened lifespan, lost time to medical care, whatever?

What's the externality society bears for the individual's pleasure?

Figure that out, and assign tobacco taxes accordingly.

[tmnvix]

Long since past the point of smokers in Australia and NZ paying their own healthcare costs. Smokers subsidise the public healthcare system.

Unfortunately, the statistics are often muddied by externalised costs being assumed to include ~50k/year of lost life per smoker along with 'lost future income taxes'.

Generally smokers die earlier and more quickly. Ironically, living a very long life might actually cost society more due to many more years of intensive healthcare costs at the end of a long life.

I once heard an actuary claim that the tobacco taxes paid by smokers in NZ, if used for private health insurance for the individual, would afford the absolute best health cover available with funds to spare.

I apologise for not citing sources for the above claims. Quite frankly I am lazy and it would take some time (I have spent hours researching this in the past). You'll just have to take this as opinion.

[MertsA]

I don't think there's really a fair way to do that. From a strictly monetary standpoint, smokers die many years earlier than non smokers. They also often live past the prime of their working life so those lost years equate to a tremendous amount of money saved in reduced payouts for social security, medicare, pensions, etc.

Even if we could assign a strict dollar amount to the long term cost of a pack of cigarettes I don't think that would be a useful thing to do. The cost to society does not factor in the cost to the consumer and while I'm normally pretty libertarian about such things we're talking about a very addictive drug here.