It took an immense effort over many decades to fight the tobacco industry. The food industry is orders of magnitudes more powerful and the "addiction" more widespread and entrenched, cause and effect even harder to prove.

Probably because second-hand smoke is a thing.

Whatever truth there is to this, I think the death knell for smoking was the success of anti-smoking campaigns to frame smokers as our common enemy due to second hand smoke and whip up public sentiment (that is always looking for a politically acceptable group to vilify) against them.

This is the same hatred that authorities were able to leverage in the recent vaccine stuff. Some grain of truth gets distorted so that the out-group isn't just presenting an acute risk in some very specific situations, but becomes an evil that must be fought even when it doesnt actually affect us.

Reducing smoking is probably a good thing. I'm definitely happy I quit years ago. But at what cost?

I'm a smoker, and it stinks and affects other people around directly.

It makes sense that it's different than things that don't drink and affects others directly.

I don't feel like smokers are vilified at all, people just don't like to stand or have to work in their smoke.