I'd love to go back to the idyllic times of the 1950s when children could be children, protected from all kinds of evil. I'd like violence to be make-believe. I'd like it if children learn to cope with grief and making decisions. In that perfect world, cigarettes and maybe sneaking a beer in HS were all it took to be bad. We didn't encounter much that stopped us from becoming mature adults with our minds intact.
But, look around you for heaven's sake! Kids are drugged up because they aren't expected to develop self control or responsible decision making. The legal stuff is often worse than the illegal poisons they ingest. They don't learn to distinguish fantasy from reality, as the media, technology, and over-manipulated lives have blurred that distinction.
Yeah cigarettes are evil. But let's worry about the stuff that's even worse. I find it insane that kids can't buy a pack of cigarettes inside a store but can go in the parking lot and get heroin or to a doctor and get some mind-altering poison.
Just treat it as alcohol; ignoring it is condoning it, and doing so because worse things are out there isn’t justifiable. Those other things you mention are already illegal; focusing on them instead of tobacco is like taking the bait and fighting over partial-birth abortion instead of abortion itself.