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Against every anecdote such as yours, one can give anecdotes to the contrary.

Yup.

My father, a heavy smoker until the week he died, lived to 94 (and buit us a room full of furnature at 93). My mother, a heavy smoker until her 70s, is still with us at 85.

OTOH I'm 56, two of my girlfriends from my teens or early 20s died of lung cancer in their 40s, a third was diagnosed, this spring, in her early 50s. All were smokers.

If you graph the data in the link I provided above one of the things that really jumps out at you is that smokers their 40s experience a rapid rise in the listed cancers to around seven times the rate of non-smokers, and that this difference persists on into their 70's, at which point the gap begins to close.

That's to me one of the really tragic aspects of smoking: that for many smokers it not days in the twilight of their lives that are lost, but that they are taken from us in the prime of life.

I'm no prohibitionist, and I have nothing but sympathy for smokers who want to quit, and can't.

But given that these three women were typical in that they started smoking in their early teens, that nicotine is highly addictive, and that if you don't start smoking until your early twenties you are unlikely ever to do so, I don't think they were in a position to make a rational decision to start smoking.

And if I was Supreme Despot, providing ciggies to those under 16 would be a crime with pretty draconian consequences for the adults who at some point in the process have to make such diversions possible.