With alcohol: how to factor in violence due to alcohol? How much less police incidents Friday / Saturday evening due to less alcohol? But what about people maybe going out less than before, or spending less money when doing so (will they pay the same prize for drinks if there's no alcohol involved)? What about sports betting and gambling industry (where it's legal)? How will it affect illegal drug use (we've been through that, but it's been long enough for people to say "well, it was different than").
Even the death statistic is tough to do. "Pre-mature death due to smoking", maybe the person also was overweight and had diabetes, how do you estimate how long this person would have lived, if they didn't smoke?
In every step of the way is the possibility for variance. Social sciences, from sociology, to psychology, to health, is such a minefield. Medicine of course is half and half. You can do a lot of stuff on the level of biology, chemistry, hard science in a lab, but health benefits/damages are "observed" in practice (observational studies). And the number of problems there are just ... huge.
I could go on and on and on...
But yeah, I also am concerned about how safety driven we are for things and unwilling to take risks as a culture but that might be recency bias because I'm reading "Where is my flying car?" and they basically make the same point about the regulatory state stymieing innovation in the name of safety (often for absurd things like nuclear)