Informant38

Foyled Again, by Big Tobacco
Spin of The Day

In the words of the industry itself, the campaign was aimed at "promoting cigarettes and protecting them from these and other attacks," by "creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it, and advocating the public's right to smoke, without actually urging them to take up the practice."

How Tobacco and PR Grew Up Together
disinfopedia

It's possible to be, as I am, bitterly opposed to the manipulation of the general public by the inhuman corporate mind, and still not condemn tobacco or its use. We have no way of measuring what tobacco usage would have been had the corporate/capitalist takeover of public consciousness, through advertising, not happened.
People were coerced into smoking, brainwashed into it; it's the coercion that was wrong. Interesting that the feeble, and anonymous, success of the anti-smoking campaigners has been entirely the result of using those same brainwashing techniques against the practice of smoking tobacco. Interesting that the far more deadly use of gasoline remains untouched.
What I'm trying to say is the tobacco companies have committed criminal acts, and are culpable - they've murdered thousands, even millions of people - but it isn't tobacco that's at the heart of the crime.
Tobacco is a sacred herb to the original inhabitants of North America. Its casual use isn't problematic.
The real evil is in the tools of the brainwash, which emerge untouched, again. Which have been in fact employed by the same people who feel so smug about their great victory against the evil herb.
This same smugness shows up again in the "anti-drug" campaigners who ridicule teenage pot-users while the disaffected kids, the ones whose radar still works, who aren't buying the increasingly evil party line, are drugged into pharmaceutical insensibility by corporate-owned professionals.