Some experts doubt it. As long as cigarettes and other combustible tobacco products are legal, it’s likely some people will smoke them. Efforts to prohibit them are likely to fail, they say. (Remember Prohibition?)

“It’s hard to do a ban on cigarettes because you’re taking something away from people they have and are using. Once you have something, you hold tight,” said Richard Daynard, a Northeastern University law professor who focuses on tobacco issues.

Better, he said, to bar people from having a product in the first place. He is intrigued by legal efforts in Singapore and a handful of other countries to ban sales of tobacco to anyone born after a certain year — 2000, say. That would be constitutional, he said. The question is: Would our culture accept it?