The Food and Drug Administration - Ignoring the Elephant in the Living Room

I applaud the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for acting to ban lethal, useless trans fat from all foods, a measure which it is believed could prevent 7000 deaths each year.  There now is the potential that the agency will tackle other dangerously over-consumed food ingredients: salt and sugar.
It is curious that there is no hope on the horizon that it will take any action to address the elephant in the room: cigarettes, which we have known for at least half a century pose the most serious risk of any legal product, believed to be responsible for a stunning 500,000 fatalities per annum.  I wonder if the creators of tobacco could have envisioned the extent to which their invention poses a daily menace to society today.  In addition to the obvious effects on the individual that smokes, others are endangered by smokers that engage in their addiction while attempting to operate a vehicle and those that smoke in bed, causing fires that kill and leave people homeless.
Sensible individuals know that if cigarettes were introduced as a new product today, there not be a ghost of a chance of approval for mass distribution.  
There is an inherent flaw in a society which allows a lethal drug addiction which inflicts so much misery to be freely passed from generation to generation.  To those that believe smoking is a matter of free choice which the government has no business regulating, consider the fact that most tobacco addicts become hooked before they reach the age of majority, and that smoking-related illnesses are costing you and the rest of us countless (borrowed) billions of dollars per year as we absorb the costs of treating those that suffer wholly preventable suffering and death.  The response of the FDA to those concerned about killer tobacco is, "We do not hear you".