If you switch nicotine out for a different socially acceptable drug – alcohol – and suddenly that's not so unreasonable. It's long been argued that the US model

If you switch nicotine out for a different socially acceptable drug – alcohol – and suddenly that's not so unreasonable. It's long been argued that the US model of "no alcohol until you're 21" followed by full (and largely unsupervised) access to as much alcohol as you can afford leads to more young adult problems with alcohol than something more akin to various western European cultures where some small degree of supervised alcohol consumption before being legally allowed to buy and consume unlimited amounts. I see this a lot where "${thing} is bad" leads to people saying "we should stop letting people have ${thing}" and trying to raise kids as if ${thing} doesn't exist or as if they can choose to not be addicted / influenced by ${thing}, regardless of how realistic that is. Pick your vice, sex, drugs, guns, rock and roll, pop music, movies, TV, the internet at large, social media, communism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, power tools, knives, etc. And it seems to me, more often than not, heavily "abstinence only" treatment of ${thing} results in far more harm than in trying to model ways to healthily deal with the fact that ${thing} exists and may vary well be something you have to deal with. I think of it like an immune system response. Your body needs to encounter pathogens in order to learn how to deal with them. Sure it would be ideal if you never ever got sick at all. But since that's basically impossible, and we know that trying to do that often results in unintended side effects, it's better instead to teach people (and their immune systems) how to deal with things. People get taught to wash their hands, cover their mouths, and immune systems get vaccines, and exposure to pathogens by not keeping our kids in hermetically sealed environments. Should you go out an intentionally get your kid sick? No, generally speaking you shouldn't. But that's exactly the goal of a vaccine. Get your body a little sick, so that it's better prepared to deal with the real thing when it gets there. Or see also chicken pox parties (though I don't know if that's still a thing or even recommended anymore)