Cigarette users don't nearly always spiral into behaviors that are both self-destructive, heartbreaking to family, and sometimes violently criminal toward the innocent bystanders nearby.

>Cigarettes are already legal despite killing 7x as many in the US as all opioids combined every day, week, month, and year.

That's because they do it after at least decades of use and for a much smaller percentage (if opioids were used by the same number of people, we'd be knee-deep on corspes in the streets), and they don't affect nowhere near as much (if at all) the general functioning or mental health of their users.

Even the average user's health is not really that affected, unless they get C after decades of use. There are much worse offenders (like eating and a sedentary lifestyle).

> Cigarettes are already legal despite killing 7x as many in the US as all opioids combined

Is that true? I am not denying it, but the opiate overdose rate is staggering.

Yeah it's somewhere near half a million people per year in the US die from diseases caused by cigarette smoking. Fent's body count last I checked was like 77,000.

Whether they are a fair comparison I'm not sure. It might be more accurate to say that while fentanyl can kill you, cigarettes make you live less long, rather than to say they kill you. No one drops dead from lighting a cigarette. Meanwhile, if it weren't for unreliable dosing due to black market pressures, I'm not sure regular, reliably dosed opiate usage would kill you slow the way cigarettes do.[citation needed] Anecdotally, I've noticed that ex junkies often look ten years younger than they have any right to.

Cigarettes are a slow poison and mild stimulant at worst. It really doesn’t modify a person’s day to day behavior in any significant way.

Sends them out to stand in the rain several times a day....