Smoking tobacco is the biggest preventable cause of death in our community. As many as one in two smokers will eventually die from causes related to, or exacerbated by, their addiction.

Tobacco companies, who can be fairly and accurately described as merchants of death, have spent countless millions of dollars over decades seeking to buy legitimacy by funding research and public relations designed to counter the long-since irrefutable evidence that to take up smoking or to continue the habit is dangerous to the point of suicidal.

But it is not illegal – and, as is clear with the thriving black market for illicit substances, prohibition is a hopeless way to seek to manage drug policy, anyway.

One of the most impressive, effective examples of enlightened public policy in recent history has been the reduction in the proportion of the population that smokes. Since 1980, the adult smoking rate has been halved to 17.5 per cent.

That outcome has been driven by a combination of education and tax-led price increases. To that policy armoury has been added plain packaging, a world-leading policy introduced in Australia in December 2012. It is an innovation being watched around the globe, and is seen as a psychologically powerful buttress to the education and price campaign that has, by definition, saved so many lives. And yet there are ideologues currently – perhaps unwittingly – doing the bidding of tobacco companies by using figures supplied by, yes, tobacco companies to argue plain packaging has led to an increase in smoking.

This bizarre and gormless campaign has been couched as proof that a push by the ”nanny state” against smoking has backfired. What it is fundamentally about is the tobacco companies’ desire to prevent the spread of plain packaging. A growing number of nations are considering following Australia’s example, and tobacco companies have been campaigning against the policy for years.

The anti-nanny state ideologues are pushing disingenuous nonsense. They argue plain packaging drives down prices and thus fuels demand. Were that so, the answer is not to reverse the policy, but to increase the excise on cigarettes, thereby strengthening the highly effective policy melange of pricing, packaging and education.

There is a glaring absurdity in big tobacco’s argument. Were the policy the failure suggested by big tobacco and its witless apologists in the media, why would the industry be spending so much time and money opposing the measure?

This newspaper prefers to use authoritative, independent figures rather than self-serving, unsubstantiated data supplied by tobacco companies. So, here are the facts and figures provided by the Commonwealth Treasury and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Treasury’s’s data shows that 3.4 per cent fewer cigarettes were sold in 2013, the first year of plain packaging. When Treasury’s figures are adjusted for population growth, they show a fall of 5 per cent in the number of cigarettes sold per per person in 2013.

The picture is supported by ABS information. Australia’s national accounts reveal a fall of 0.9 per cent in the amount of cigarettes and tobacco sold last year. That accelerated in the first three months of this year, with a slide of 7.6 per cent, reflecting the added impact of a tax increase on tobacco.

The Age is not shackled by ideology, and would not champion research paid for by big tobacco. We believe the public interest is paramount, not the self-interest of an industry that preys on addicts.

The most important market we have is the free market for ideas. It is the crucible of public policies that improve the world. And it is a place where facts trump zealotry.