Question: why are cigarettes not illegal when it kills people, its a big cause for lung cancer, heart failure and limits you to doing activity's and hobbies? cant we just decrease the amount of cigarettes we are selling?

Tatiana Trantidou answered on 19 Jun 2015:

Personally, I think cigarettes should be illegal, because they do nothing but harm to people’s health. But the tobacco industry makes huge profits and has a great influence on governments, politicians and the society in general. If the cigarette industry shuts down, many people will lose their jobs, people that are already addicted to cigarettes will try to smoke illegally. Also not many politicians are willing to ban cigarettes, because this will unsatisfy people who vote for them and also important cigarette manufacturers who sometimes give the politicians money to advertise themselves during elections. Moreover, the government will lose a huge amount of money if they ban cigarettes, because they get a lot of taxes from their sales.
All these things make banning or even decreasing the amount of selling cigarettes a very complicated problem to solve.