[tom_b]

Tax policies to reduce smoking rates seem to show reasonable effectiveness:

"the rule of thumb in the United States is that a 10 percent price increase on a pack of cigarettes results in anywhere from a 2.5 percent to a 5.0 percent overall decline in smoking, with most studies showing an average 4.0 percent drop" from https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20160919.471471/...

Data and analytics for this are worth reading about - I find geographic issues (low-tax areas across state lines, total numbers of retail locations selling tobacco products, etc) along with concepts of price elasticity to be interesting modeling problems.

You might want to check out:

https://publications.iarc.fr/Book-And-Report-Series/Iarc-Han...

It has a bunch of freely-available chapters talking about this area of research.

[lowdose]

To maximize tax collected on cigarettes prices rise every year with a few percent which compounds to doubling the price in 10 years. If you want people to stop smoking a government would double the price over night, but that would hurt their ability to collect tax and we can't have that happening can we?