I love it when Progressives tie themselves in knots like this.
So on one hand we must impose high "sin" taxes to discourage "incorrect" and harmful personal behavior like smoking and fatty foods. But then it turns out that high taxes on bad behavior affect "poor" people disproportionately as compared to "rich" people. (Smoking is more prevalent among the "poor" than it is with the affluent) It pits the Progressive urge towards correcting "improper" behavior against their sense of "social justice". What to do, what to do?
IMHO, sin taxes should exclusively be used to mitigate the affects of the sin. However, the other knot in the rope is that governments are now as addicted to the revenues from cigarette and other sin taxes as the smokers are to the cigarettes. While logic might dictate that the revenues from these taxes should go to cessation programs, this will never be the case as we're talking about billions in tax revenue, and the bulk of those revenues already go to fund other aspects of government which have absolutely nothing to do with smoking. The reality is that government needs people to smoke as much as those smokers need to quit. The poor are just collateral damage to that end.
