Taxes emerge in ways that are hard to predict from a cauldron of special interest pleadings and pressures. The taxes that emerge tend to be those that do the least damage and provoke the least resistance. Up to the point where smuggling is not a problem, a tobacco tax does little economic damage. The demand for tobacco does not respond by much to price changes. This means the tobacco tax is mainly a transfer of income from smokers to non-smokers.
Economic damage comes from taxes that change people's behaviour.
A tax that discourages consumption may force workers out of their jobs, lead to the abandonment of factories, and force consumers to seek less satisfying substitutes for their lost consumption. These changes are a loss to those being taxed and are not a gain to the government. The tobacco tax seems to have low deadweight losses. His notion was that if one interest group is trying to take resources away from another, it will have to invest money in politics. To make such investment worthwhile the returns have to be good.