[soylentcola]

To be fair, the tobacco issue is due to the delivery method of smoking rather than the active ingredient (nicotine). On its own, nicotine is an addictive but relatively mild stimulant in normal doses. People desire it for the typical stimulant effects (energy, focus, wakefulness, appetite suppression) but as long as the predominant delivery method involves the repeated inhalation of carbon monoxide, lung-coating tars, particulates, and hundreds of other hazardous compounds, it comes with a terrible burden to health.

If everyone had been smoking coffee grounds to ingest caffeine all these years, I'd imagine there would be similar issues around caffeine. Thankfully, there are other delivery methods for nicotine which are more in line with those for caffeine but they are often prohibitively expensive (inhalers, gum, etc) or under a lot of pressure from tobacco companies and those who produce the gum, patches, and inhalers (nicotine vaporizers commonly referred to as "e-cigarettes").

I think that as long as people derive a benefit from nicotine (like caffeine) there should be a lot more support for these more novel delivery methods that don't involve the inhalation of burning leaves. You can argue that anything habit-forming is negative and undesirable but as with coffee or tea, people often find it worth the tradeoff of potential blood pressure issues common to stimulants.