“But nicotine slaves are all the same
At a pettin’ party or a poker game
Everything gotta stop while they have a cigarette
Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette
Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death
Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate
That you hate to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette”
Merle Travis and Tex Williams

That song was a household anthem of my post-WWII ‘40s and ‘50s childhood. My parents were heavy smokers. Mom often went through three packs a day. She died the long, slow way of emphysema at the age of 50, spending most of her last ten years hooked up to oxygen tanks. It was not pretty. Dad quit when it became obvious that smoking had destroyed his wife. Though I could have avoided more of them, I am grateful and fortunate that I completely avoided the vice of smoking. Still, my lungs have always been compromised by growing up in a house of smoke.
I mention this personal history as context to my personal reaction to the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Health Interview Survey which found that in 2015 15.2 percent of American adults smoke cigarettes. That’s a troubling number of nicotine slaves to those who care about the health of fellow countrymen, but it’s a monumental decrease since 1962 when 42 percent of Americans were smokers, including Mom.
Stanford’s Dr. Robert Proctor has written “The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization…. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year, a number that will rise to nearly 2 million per year by the 2020s or 2030s…. Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20 000 cigarettes per min. Cigarette makers make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, which means that the value of a life to a cigarette maker is about US $10 000.”
One human life=$10,000 corporate profit.
Despite the best coordinated efforts of the tobacco industry’s “denialist campaigns” to deny that cigarettes are “the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization,” along with denying their awareness of this danger and making such absurd claims as that the science wasn’t complete and more studies needed to be made, etc., etc., the awareness of reality filtered into the consciousness of the majority of Americans with the help of higher taxation on tobacco and outlawing smoking in most public places. (A pertinent local side note: Sun Valley Mayor Dewayne Briscoe was instrumental in the passage of the Washington clean indoor air act in 1985, the model for subsequent anti-smoking laws in Washington and many other states.)
That is, exposing the lack of credibility of the denialist campaigns of the tobacco industry worked. Not perfectly. Not completely. But it’s better than it was in 1962 and a lot of people are alive who wouldn’t be otherwise.
That is, take heart, all you activists against climate change deniers, the causes of gun violence deniers and the world-wide environmental collapse deniers.
Persevere.