Giving What We Can describes some opposition to governments that tobacco companies bring:

France cut its smoking rate in half between 1990 and 2005 by using tax to steadily increase the real price of cigarettes. And South Africa, a middle-income country, was able to do the same over a similar period (Jha and Peto 2014, pp.64-65).

However, there is one powerful reason to think tobacco taxation might not be a tractable intervention. The tobacco industry and its agents directly and indirectly oppose tobacco control measures, including taxation. They lobby governments, spread misinformation, and bring costly lawsuits against governments that attempt to control tobacco use (see e.g., Mamudu et al. 2008 and Sebrie at al. 2006 )

As a result, organizations that advocate for tobacco taxes not only have to design and build support for effective tobacco taxes, but also help defend the policies against the tobacco industry’s attempts to block, dismantle, and neuter them. In addition to this kind of direct opposition, tax advocates may find themselves operating in places where the institutions needed to establish and maintain the tax system are weak, dysfunctional, or corrupt. Such factors and others may explain the (relative) absence of “global level policy prescriptions” and the “lack of public involvement in tax-related policies” noted by Uwe Gneiting (2015, pp.9-10). Finally, some countries may be parties to international agreements that, in practice, limit their ability to defend the legality of tobacco taxes even when these taxes are morally and politically justified.