There's a huge black market for tobacco products here in Australia and it's completely legal, simply having the tax on it so high has led to massive smuggling operations, black market cigarettes in many convenience stores, and a fire bombing epidemic of those same convenience stores for carrying competitors black market cigs. It doesn't even need to be illegal. Just too expensive.

1930s didnt have overwhelming evidence that smoking was stupid, addictive, and disastrously dangerous to your health.

Smoking doesnt produce the same euphoria and consistency of drugs on the current blackarket. The juice wont be worth the squeeze. Financially, there wont be enough "consumers" for a cigarette black market.

Sure, but a lot has changed since then, and while that totally could happen, I'm doubting it'll be widespread in any way.

I think it might be different nowadays. We know now that smoking causes cancer. Also the world is in color, which makes not smoking more enjoyable.

Maybe at first, yeah. But in 50 years, when almost nobody under 60 smokes and it's prohibited everywhere, who would go out of their way to start this particular habit?

As a lifelong smoker, one of the hardest hurdle to quitting is going out, having a couple of drinks, then seeing other people smoke and resisting the urge to go buy an easily available pack.

Exactly.

Outright bans never work with vices.

It can't be taken 1:1. Vices being banned in the past was typically because legislators saw them as productivity drains, despite the pleasure it provided. Therefore making those bans inherently tyrannical to habitual users and certain non-users, incentivizing disobedience.

But this time, it's being banned for a group that's not habitually using already, meaning extraordinary reasons would require them to become habitual users in the first place. And smoking is typically not very pleasant at the start to begin with, so there's little incentive to start. And, unlike in the past, smoking is no longer present everywhere. And of course there's the knowledge that it will give you cancer and cut your lifespan.

There's just not much enjoyment left, so even if 1% of those affected by the rolling ban slip through the cracks with an underground market, there isn't the room for growth that sustains or spreads an illegal market like for eg. recreational drugs. Which is why those bans need to be enforced to perfection to have a chance to work, which they never do, and which is why they never work.

There are so many ways for people to harm themselves that we don't need to ban because they come with severe risk to the person, so they self regulate. The only reason smoking needs that ban is because of how widespread smoking was, and so even if way less people start smoking than before, that's still way too many people. A ban just needs to be successful at getting far less people to start, not absolutely halt every single usage, and eventually it will fade from culture on it's own.

EDIT: Slight corrections. But kinda wild to get overly downvoted for the thing pretty much everyone else is saying in this thread, just with a little more in-depth analysis. Come out and tell me where I'm wrong, I don't think you can.

Same reason people in the UK think cocaine is safer then cannabis, public stigma.

I think a lot of it is because pharmacies and doctors didn’t want this thrust upon them.

This was an amendment to a really shitty vape ban bill which blew the whole black market up further than it was. The whole thing should never have been passed.

Lucky country policy

Like a ladder that is being constantly pulled up.