How can you say that with regards to tobacco? It's all but illegal, completely banned in most public places, you can basically only use it in your home or outdoors alone.

"Not on the timescale you want" is the salient point.

If the system actually worked tobacco would actually be banned and not almost.

Despite being only able to smoke outdoors I still see many young people in Spain taking up the habit.

What if people don't share your priorities and would rather smoke despite the health consequences. Where does this line of thinking end? Why should someone else get to tell us how to prioritize pleasurable activities vs health and longevity.

The argument about misleading advertising I understand, and if you'd said "advertising portraying smoking as safe would actually be banned" then I think there's a clearer argument (despite my being uncomfortable with the idea of "misinformation" being targeted, we have lots of reasonable precedents for statement you can make about products you sell). But legislating what people's health priorities should be is authoritarian and not a power government should ever have.

Why should tobacco be banned? That's just another war on drugs that didn't work for alcohol or pot, and isn't working for the current illicit drugs. People should be allowed to smoke what they want, as long as it isn't a health issue for others. If young people in Spain want to smoke outside or in their homes, so what?

Nobody starts smoking because they like it. They get roped into it by others.

Pretty much everyone I know regrets they ever started. That's the difference. Many other drugs are actually nice to use.

I don't want to ban it for those old people that have smoked all their lives. But that young people still take it up is worrying.

But timescales actually matter. Without any expectation of a specific time scale, you can claim that anything is actually working perfectly and just hasn’t worked yet.

That tobacco is "all but illegal" now (in the US - the same exact companies continue their murderous strategies in developing countries) is a bit late for all the people who lost family members in slow and horrifying agony.

Their execs kept the money they made.

Their model was so "successful" that it has been studied, copied, and extended by the other industries I named - with global and irreversible consequences.

As was put so succinctly above; timescales matter. Oceans don't give a fuck what I want, they won't de-acidify themselves no matter how much I cry about the marketplace of ideas/