[megatherium]

The tobacco companies didn't want to pay out all that money, of course. What they wanted, however, was for the state legislatures to not spend the money on smoking cessation and prevention programs. They had some success at that. California ran an anti-smoking TV ad campaign that was very successful (teen smoking rates dropped a lot in California) until the legislature pulled the fiscal plug. Anti-smoking activists blame the tobacco lobbyists for that.

I don't want the government collecting taxes from cigarettes if that means that the government has a good reason to keep cigarettes sales up. If we didn't collect taxes from cigarettes, we would have to make up the revenue from something else. Sales taxes or income taxes say. So our taxes would go up if cigarette taxes went away. A purely hypothetical situation of course, no one will reduce taxes on cigarettes.

[MEGoody]

If we didn't collect taxes from cigarettes, we would have to make up the revenue from something else.

Exactly. So if the price of cigarettes actually forces people to stop in large numbers, the government will have to go after something else to replace the revenue. (They probably already have in some places.)