I think many people would like to see their loved ones live longer, healthier lives and die with relative comfort. That doesn't require being denial about their mortality.
I don't disagree. But it's also not clear why the government should incentivize individually cheap, collectively expensive personal decisions like current smoking patterns.
Which doesn't, in itself, justify a particularly nasty form of death for hundreds of thousands of people. Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
Having more pleasurable life when young while trading for a more gruesome death after 80 is not that bad of trade off.
There was a joke:
- Drinking, smoking and whoring shorten your life with 6 years. - Which six? Between 92 and 98 - take it.