Are you making the argument that restricting cigarette sales by age does not work?

Quite the opposite

Thank you to clarify. I agree with your point. The reduction in underage people smoking in rich countries has plumetted in the last 30 years. Much of that is due to stricter enforcement of retail and advertising rules.

Cigarettes aren't speech. I don't understand why anyone would argue otherwise.

No, but there the issue is bodily autonomy. Which arguably is much more important a right than free speech.

Is bodily autonomy a recognized right in any sense? Is there a society that actually respects the right to bodily autonomy legally or in practice - meaning, using any drugs at will, the right to suicide, to agree to being eaten by a friendly cannibal, and so on? I don't think there is, and nobody is pushing for it.

The Okapa District, pre missionary, pre kiaps .. you were good to go until the mid 1950s at least .. and then colonizers spread their values.

> to agree to being eaten by a friendly cannibal

They had standards though, you'd have to work to gain the respect for anyone to want to eat you as a mortuary ritual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FK5N_ObFeQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore_people

There's two parts though:

1. the right to not have someone else do stuff to your body

2. your right to do anything to it

Number 1 is pretty well established.

Number 2 less so, and I think that comes down to us as a society noticing that many people can't be trusted with full access here. Ask any clean addict and they will tell you what a colossal mistake it was to start using the drug in the first place. The regulation of what you can do with your own body is, in my opinion, a regulation to protect future you from present you. Because we all know what the present you has worse impulse control and judgement than future you would like.

Tobacco regulation is actually something I don't see people talked often. Some seem to have restricted it and succeed, or failed. Some seems to let it go and succeed, or failed. It's seemingly less sexy than either alcohol or marijuana, maybe because USA is one example where they just let cigarettes go and succeed anyway.

My country is an example where it failed anyway. Whether we are considered to have tried regulating it or not is a bit complicated.