So is tobacco ok if it's local? I eat mostly local food and once in a while someone offers me some locally farmed tobacco and I try it. That's not "industry" but it's also probably not great for me.
It's definitely "not great" for you. But there is also not an entire industry spending big bucks trying to get you addicted (and it sounds you do it every now and then, so that's not so bad). So there is a difference imho.
The problem is when someone makes a profit from your use of that tobacco, especially if they aren't covering the enormous costs of your premature illness or death
If you were to grow, dry, and roll your own tobacco it absolutely would be better for you than cigarettes. "Ok" is a judgment call so that's up to you.
Plain tobacco leaves are much less dangerous for your health than the highly engineered commercial cigarettes that have additives that increase addictiveness, inhibit coughing, "improve taste", improve shelf life, etc.
Literally every source (including the tobacco companies themselves, who have been cowed by legal pressure) say that no cigarette is safer than any other. It's the tobacco itself that's the problem.
This is the settlement that Natural American Spirit had to agree to because they couldn't provide evidence that additive-free cigarettes are any safer:
> It's likely safer but not meaningfully enough to make much difference, as it's still obviously very bad for you
There's no evidence that it's safer at all. Reynolds lost a big lawsuit over its American Spirit brand implying that their cigarettes are safer. If they could have provided evidence to the contrary, they would have.
I doubt it's likely at all. The thing that makes tobacco dangerous is high temperature combustion and nicotine. You get BOTH in natural tobacco.
The thousands of "chemicals" from cigarettes are not put in there. They come from combustion. Setting shit on fire makes chemicals turn into other chemicals, some of them very harmful. That's why many survivors of 9/11 later died from lung cancer.
> In pure form, nicotine is a colorless to yellowish, oily liquid that readily penetrates biological membranes and acts as a potent neurotoxin in insects, where it serves as a antiherbivore toxin.
> The overwhelming majority of independent research shows that filters do not reduce the harms associated with smoking - a fact understood by tobacco industry scientists in the 1960s. In fact, filters may increase the harms caused by smoking by enabling smokers to inhale smoke more deeply into their lungs.
Also, plain common sense will tell you that inhaling toxic smoke through a small piece of paper is not much healthier than inhaling toxic smoke directly.