When I was a kid, we used to call cigarettes cancer sticks. Some people with a straight face claim that people still don’t know smoking is risky. The message has got through. Smoking is been in a long-term decline since the mid-1960s.
Along with my brothers and sisters, I remember pestering my mother to give up smoking. When she did, no one noticed at 11 weeks until she drew our attention to it. Children have short attention spans.
My father gave up smoking because, as a doctor, he could not be recommending to his patients to give up smoking while having a working ashtray at his desk. He used to suck on lollies to get rid of the craving. He first brought home a bag of lollies, but when his kids started asking for a lolly, he had to buy two bags of lollies before he came home.
Most of the evidence in perception risks by smokers show that they actually greatly overstate the risk of smoking rather than don’t know that it is dangerous as it is as Kip Viscusi found:
…smokers are not isolated from the considerable public information about the hazards of cigarettes.
They are very much aware of the risks. Indeed, they overestimate the smoking-related risks of lung cancer, life expectancy loss, and total mortality loss. Perception of these hazards affects the decision to ever smoke, to be a current smoker, and to become a former smoker in the expected manner.
Moreover, there is evidence of consistent risk-taking behaviour, as people who use seatbelts or exercise care in their diets make risk-reducing choices in the smoking domain as well. People who forego health insurance and place their well-being substantially at risk by doing so are especially likely to smoke and not to quit once they have begun.
Cigarette smoking is a large risk that is highly correlated with other risk-taking activities among the current smoking population
In the 1950s,cigarette companies would market particular cigarettes as having lower tar and other factors that made them less likely to cause health problems.
I think smoking is a dirty and disgusting habit, but people do plenty of things that are dirty and disgusting or risky or unhealthy. Perhaps we should ban the sports and holiday activities of the fit and healthy: ban mountain climbing, bushwalking, skiing and tourism to dangerous and unhealthy places in the Third World.
Smokers smoke for the same reason people engage in other risky activities. They really like smoking and are willing to take their chances. Smoking is hard to give up because most people find it hard to give up anything they really like to do. Few people are addicted to things they don’t like to do.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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