Stochastic Cigarettes

Governments around your planet have attempted to discourage smoking of cigarettes by various means; taxation, bland packaging, and large warning labels such as "Smoking kills" and "Smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease".

This has not been notably effective.

The problem is clearly one of psychology.

Humans seem predisposed to a sort of inane optimism which flies in the face of rational analysis, which can be summed up as, "Every day things fail to go wrong confirms us in the unjustified belief that everything is all right."

What is needed is a greater element of certainty.

Simply, this consists of treating a tiny portion of tobacco with a fast-acting volatile toxin and inserting it into one in every 5000 cigarettes.

The labels then just read, "1 in 5000 chance of instant death"

Since this figure is much higher than the average risk of developing a smoking-related fatal disease in the same timeframe, all other causes of death become insignificant and the smoker has only one highly reliable factor to consider (At five cigarettes a day, 5000 cigarettes will be consumed in 2.7 years).

This has many advantages.

1. Massive reductions in healthcare costs. Treating smoking-related diseases is expensive, lengthy, and untimately unlikely to provide prolonged benefit. Since abrupt death is not treatable, the financial benefits are clear.

2. Smokers continue to pay tax right up to the moment they die.

3. The judicious choice of toxic agent would allow for harvest of organs for transplant. A short-lived non-persistant CNS agent would be ideal. The fact that the deceased is still clenching a cigarette in their cooling fingers would be a generally recognised de-facto organ donor alert.