[spacemark]

Good points. If I can take a crack at the exercise for the reader, I think the inconsistency has fairly straight forward reasons, even if they're frustrating: humans are terrible at reasoned risk analysis (if they even see the value); people prefer absolutes and easy heuristics to "it depends"; most people have first-hand experience with the extremes of smoking and drinking and it's thus easy to vilify; the best defense of vice is pleasure, which isn't much of a defense in the eyes of many, whereas exposure to pollution and cosmic rays is impossible to prevent without giving up near-universally valued things (transportation, energy).

We see similar patterns with nuclear power, climate change, and pandemics...