>>510874453 (OP)Artificial scarcity and limited availability to increase prices. The governments are not trying to ban smoking. They are instilling fear in you that it might get banned completely soon (any day now!), so hurry up and buy your fix at an exorbitant price. Do you have any idea how much money tobacco taxes bring into state budgets every year? If people actually started quitting en masse, Big Tobacco would start twisting off politicians' heads.
Then again, smoking today is not what it used to be. Back in the day, tobacco was exclusively enjoyed by men, and it was pure tobacco that had undergone natural fermentation, smoked in cigars, through pipes and roll-your-owns. It wasn't considered a vice, just a pastime.
But tobacco companies wanted more money for less effort. So they hired (((Edward Bernays))), who popularized smoking among women, effectively doubling the market. But women couldn't really smoke cigars or pipes due to high nicotine content. And since women are lazy, roll-your-owns were made compact and easier to handle, leading to creation of the cigarette. It was followed by a massive Hymiewood campaign to popularize them.
Gradually, Big Tobacco decided to expand again while also realizing that most smokers don't care about the taste, as long as the nicotine hit is there. So they started slowly substituting tobacco (a very expensive crop to grow and process) first with shavings from cigar production, and when that got too pricy, with paper. Yes, simple brown paper infused with artificial aromas and sprayed with nicotine. An average smoker could not tell the difference, so the practice continued. About that time chemicals started getting added to cigarettes as well, to enhance burning and make them more addictive. And yes, they will give you cancer.
Today even top shelf, most expensive cigarettes do not contain more than 15% of tobacco, and this is the worst quality leaf, made from shavings, stems and damaged leaves.