What if smoking suddenly became much more lethal?

A"¦ well, dream"¦ of mine: what if smoking suddenly, overnight, became immediately lethal? To be more specific, this is about "active" smoking; bystanders aren't affected.

To make things more interesting, let's say every smoke (cigarette, pipe, cigar, tobacco-containing joint, every couple of pulls of an E-cigarette, etc.) has a true, independent, 50% chance of making you immediately keel over and die; anything else (if you don't die from it immediately, it still tars your lungs; non-tobacco products are not affected) has not changed. Start at our current world, optionally up to three or so decades in the past.

I'm unsure which of these three possibilities helps making the storytelling more interesting, so feel free to use either in your answer (I'm not good at writing yet):

• some scientists, newspapers or the like are informed anonymously (and untraceable) in advance of this (and, possibly, the futility of finding a cure), or
• they are informed during the same night this lethality change is enacted, or
• scientists have to figure out what's causing all those deaths by themselves.

What's the impact on the world as a whole? Wikipedia has some statistics, which makes the impact on e.g. Ethiopia (East Africa, the country that is green in both graphs, right besides the one with the horn) almost neglegible, but other countries are much more affected. I wonder how this is distributed (e.g. most people wouldn't care if the state heads keel over as long as the infrastructure still works). What's the impact on living for a (now former, probably) smoker, what on a non-smoker (besides the obvious rejoicing)? What about the children (besides the obvious "“ rejoicing at living smoke-free and, possibly, hurt because of parental death)? Surprise me. While I wish-dream of this occasionally, I've yet to build an image of a world changed like that in my head and would welcome the input.

PS: Extremely unsure about the tags, feel free to edit my question and fix them up.

posted over 8 years ago

mirabilos‭

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