I don't think that cigarettes can be easily labeled as not having a social benefit. Nicotine has cognitive enhancement effects and it seems to help people with some disorders manage them better.[0] The benefits are to the extent that nicotine has been considered as a treatment for ADHD.

Nicotine being generally available could have provided significant amounts of social benefits by allowing people to self-medicate. Current healthcare systems are absolutely not adequate for picking up the slack and that's if the healthcare system is even willing to treat those people (ADHD treatment in some European countries is tricky).

While it was certainly bad how much cigarettes were pushed and I do think this caused more harm than good, it still probably had benefits.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6018192/

Cigarettes look like a justifiable product at the level of "we roll leaves in paper," or "we give you a drug with side effects no worse than some other psychoactive drugs," but when you get in to the details of how it was actually done (carcinogens added above and beyond the smoke itself for the purpose of enhancing addiction, marketing designed around the well-known "trigger" stimulus response of relapsing drug users, denial of the effects to offload health liabilities to state insurance) it's no longer anything but an errant time in our history which will hopefully not be repeated. It is the prototypical example of the profit motive departing from the public good.

Sure, but if cigarettes weren't a thing then nicotine would probably be on the enormously long list of banned substances that you go to prison for possessing. The business is probably what kept it available for regular people. I think as smoking winds down there will be more talk of making nicotine illegal, because that's how our governments operate.

"We have to give millions of people lung cancer... to stop our irrational government from banning a relaxing drug" sounds like the plot of a villain from a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon.

It's not so much that this had to happen, but it's something that may have some social benefit. It's an unfortunate side of a society that accepts banning a wide range of things.

I'd argue the biggest glaring exception is advertising. I'd also add all kinds of rent-seeking behavior, a prime example of which are business models relying on abusing intellectual property regulations. And then you have a whole laundry list of business models and tricks that are socially negative but yield nice profits - various incarnations of "razor and blades" model, or the distressingly common in appliances sector - and now in computing hardware too - practice of replacing parts of a product with lower-quality substitutes in subsequent batches, without changing the SKU.

My own opinion is that profits and social value have become mostly misaligned a few decades ago already.

Arguably you could go back to the unsanitary meat packing plants of America's industrial revolution to find the first widely known US example of business doing things that they shouldn't to make more money. Someone with more knowledge of world history could go back farther.