A pack of cigarettes costs $222!!!!

Not exactly, for those who've seen articles about the study. Basically, the researchers took a very subjective notion, the "value of a statistical life," and extrapolated it.

The idea behind VSL is that people value their lives at a certain dollar amount -- for example, if it would take $1 million for someone to risk 1:1 odds of dying, one could say he values his life at $2 million. Economists have calculated this figure (for example) based on people who take pay cuts to get safer jobs.

What annoys me the most is, the coverage doesn't make it clear that the costs aren't real. You won't actually spend $222; you'll lose time off your life that you'd have valued at $222.

Also, no one's been kind enough to post the full study online, so it's hard to critique the methodology. Some statements from what I've been able to find, like "smoking increases the mortality risk throughout a smoker's life, not just at the end of the smoker's expected lifetime," are ridiculous (show me a verifiable smoking death of a 30-year-old and I'll retract that).

Finally, "[a]t discount rates of 15 percent or more, the cost decreases to under $25 per pack." Not quite sure how that works.