I know this is a tad off topic, but I'm not sure sin taxes exist in reality. I'm pretty sure some smart business people who are privy to the price inelasticities of such actions just found a way to harness this enelasticity for more money.
Now, as I've said on previous smoking threads... I don't care that people smoke; I just care when they don't care about other people. Prior to my college going smoke free campus wide every entrance to every building required that any and every person who wanted to enter risk walking through a haze of smoke. I couldn't leave my dorm room window open because the smokers were always outside polluting the what would be incoming air. AND instead of using ash trays or trash cans that are by every door on campus the cigarette butts ended up covering the ground. You'd think the flower beds had been mulched with cigarettes and someone had haphazardly strewn wood chips all over the place.
There's that and then there's the little problem with the smoker's self inflicted maladies. I don't really care about the smoker's health in the way some people might assume. Unless you're too young to understand tv commercials or to read than you are well aware of the cautions and risks. You getting sick and hospitalized drains money, materials, and man hours that could've been spent on people that had no control over their contraction of a malady. "but that's their job," you'll say. Well, let's insert your job into this picture and have you called into work away from your family or whatever activity you'd be doing when you're off duty ... And make you spend large amounts of time and energy trying to fix someone else's catastrophic mistakes/decisions that were more than easily avoidable.
Sure, a person who has never smoked can contract cancer, emphysema, and other such smoke induced health problems, but the stats and experiments show that such actions have a much higher chance of causing health problems. I use trypsin (the causative agent of emphysema) in the lab all the time. I know first hand how it breaks down adhesion proteins. Just because you trip and roll down a hundred flights of stairs each day and have yet to get injured doesn't mean that doing so doesn't ever cause injury directly to you or second hand injury to those people who just happen to be using the same stairs as you at the time.
If you're going to so freely inconvenience everyone else with your habit with a "why should I care about their problems that are a direct result of my actions" attitude... Then why should we care about you when you find out that years of polluting everyone else's breathing air has resulted in you needing medical attention and/or constant help (people with emphysema can have a terrible time going even short distances. Normally, breathing takes up like 3-5% of of your total body energy spent... A lung pathology like emphysema can turn that into upwards of >30% of the energy spent in the body focused towards just gasping for air. I could scrounge through my Guyton med Phys text for a proper citation.... But if you'll ignore google stats and info then you'll ignore what Doctors learn from too.
Not everyone gets these problems or at that severe a degree... But it does hurt you... And it does hurt the people around you. If you want to live your life to the fullest and that involves sucking ash, then fine. I'm all for enjoying life Just do it where unconsenting people don't have to breathe your nasty crap.
