What baffles me more is that a ton of people are vaping now, even those that haven't smoked before, because "it's, like, totally not like smoking".

I am pretty certain most of the current younger smokers had a very good idea of the health implications.

Anything that changed from a medical perspective since I am smoking is that we know by now that a 'smokers lung' is not actually that and most never get it. Otherwise all the risks are well known for 15+ years.

Tldr: I don't think people actually care about dying earlier (or more cruel), at least in countries with working or cheap health care.

> What baffles me is it took so much evidence from the medical community to convince people about smoking.

That isn't really the issue, smokers have been aware of the negative consequences for quite a while. Many are okay with it due to the relief the smoking brings them from stress and other issues, it's a trade-off. Just like alcohol ain't that healthy for you but many people still chose to drink it.

But on the other hand you have massive companies who've spent decades and billions of $ in making tobacco as addictive, and easy to smoke, as possible. So once the customers are hooked it's extremely difficult for them to kick the habit and even when they manage to kick it, many will still get cravings for years, if not decades, to come.

Which could be explained by this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoki...

For the effect on schizophrenia to explain the people who have difficulty quitting smoking, the population of people who have difficulty quitting smoking would have to be similar in size to (really, smaller than) the population of schizophrenics.

But I would bet that it's much larger.

Afaik schizophrenia is a spectrum, so some are bound to be affected worse than others. I also didn't say it was the only reason for people having trouble kicking the habit, only one of the factors for it, so there's still plenty of room for non-schizophrenics not being able to kick the habit due to tobacco (and the additives tobacco companies add to it) being highly addictive.