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The government's crusade against tobacco has been very successful. Smoking trends are way off their all-time highs (see the blue line below). My parents smoked yet nobody in the DoodleBob home smokes.

However, smoking also soothed nerves and had a societal impact as well. There was also an economic benefit, and not just in the tobacco/cigarette value chain: clubs/bars benefitted, as did live bands and acts playing in these clubs where friends got together for a drink and a smoke.

With smoking banned in most public places and many private places such as bars, there is very little live music and not as much social gathering as well. Now, correlation doesn't imply causality - people surfing the interweb wasn't caused by the demise of smoking - but we must acknowledge that when you ban some good that has been part of culture for centuries, there will be an impact. For example, with less smoking have people turned to food for comfort - is there some cause and effect in this chart?

While I'm not arguing that smoking was harmless (far from it), there was some beneficial element to smoking. As people rush to demonize vaping, let's consider what is the impact beyond "better lungs."

Two other factors:

1) Social Security going broke was SOLVED for at least the next 100 years with the deal Reagan and Congress agreed to in 1986. Now its cost is growing twice as fast, and it won’t even make it half of that time. What changed? People live longer when they don’t smoke.

2) Medical costs have gone through the roof for the elderly. What changed? Instead of dying relatively quickly and cheaply of smoking-related illnesses, people live much longer...and spend a lot more on medical stuff over those extra years.

One could also argue that the obesity/diabetes epidemic seems to correlate quite well with the reduction of smoking, although there are bigger factors involved with that huge problem.

With smoking banned in most public places and many private places such as bars, there is very little live music and not as much social gathering as well.

Do you have any evidence to back up that assertion? A cursory examination from my own experience shows no reduction of live band/bar music performances compared to those 25 years ago.

The increase in obesity could simply be due to the prevalence of more sedentary occupations as computer-aided desk jobs proliferated in the past generation since the introduction of the PC in the early 1980s, as seen by the inflection point in the red line.