We could ban advertising and attractive packaging. We could provide non-carcinogenic alternatives like nicotine gum or snus made with synthetic nicotine so no profits go to Philip Morris. We could heavily fine people who smoke around children and other non-smokers. We have all of these regulatory scalpels at our disposable but for some reason we’re always reaching for the nuclear option of prohibition. When will we learn?

I have this mental image of a migration like this leading to critical mass and the Year of the Linux Desktop, but has something like this ever lead to a significant upsrtreaming of improvements or new features?