[Maursault]

That is making the same mistake of many here and the author of the linked article, which is equating smoking cigarettes to smoking tobacco. Smoking tobacco may not be healthy, but it is not nearly as lethal as smoking (national brand and major brand) cigarettes, because cigarettes include a lot of extra stuff that is not tobacco, namely, an infusion of 300+ known carcinogens in order to increase addictiveness.

What should be banned and made illegal is the method Big Tobacco uses to process tobacco into such a lethal product [1]. If we banned this process, but permitted manufacture, sale and consumption of smoking products containing only unadulterated natural (i.e. no additives except water) tobacco, within 10-20 years, the mortality rates of smokers would plummet and return to what they were prior to the chemical revolution of the 1950s, which is probably far less though we don't know by how much because the studies only appeared after the chemical revolution.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdV_1u-TodY&t=13m25s