Essentially, you are right. Smokers are a vast money machine that fuels the economy and the health industry.
If you remain as a smoker, you will spend thousands of dollars with big tobacco. That also pays off lobbyists, politicians, and even medical researchers - due to the terms of the Master Settlement, money feeds down into universities, 'health' groups and clinical researchers.
If you remain a smoker, you will spend thousands of dollars with big pharma. You will try to quit, and fail, several times - spending hundreds of dollars on quit-smoking drugs, and maybe consulting a doctor once or twice in the process. Then, when you get sick, thousands of dollars will be spent on your treatment: hundreds of dollars on chemotherapy drugs, hundreds of dollars on doctor's fees, hundreds of dollars on hospital or clinic fees, hundreds of dollars on equipment such as oxygen, masks, gloves, and more.
As a smoker you personally, and those paying on your behalf, will certainly pay thousands to BT and about a one in two chance you will pay thousands to BP and the health industry.
But if you switch to an e-cigarette, all that money is lost to BT and BP. You won't buy tobacco, and you won't get sick - or perhaps you will have a thousandth of the chance of getting sick, and it won't include cancer and therefore the expensive and protracted cancer treatments.
There is always the chance you might try Snus, or that BT will get into e-cigarettes, and those two options are going to be about the only money-spinners for BT in the future. So by and large they have shut up about e-cigs and other alternatives like smokeless tobacco.
But agonisingly painful times are ahead for Big Pharma - people won't be stupid enough to buy their useless quit-smoking drugs when something far better, that actually works, is widely available. When you can pick up an e-cig or refills with your bread and milk, why pay for something that has a 98% chance of failure?
And when you don't get sick, they lose thousands. Multiply that by several million e-cig users and you have a desperate situation for big pharma - they stand to lose billions of dollars. Quit-smoking treatments are a one billion dollar a year global industry. Treating sick smokers must run into several billions, and a substantial part of that income is under threat.
As a consequence BP have lied and suborned their way around the world in an attempt to kill off e-cigs. In the countries most vulnerable to corruption they have bought enough government staff to ban e-cigs. In countries with a little more resilience, there is a fight between the suborned officials and politicians, and the community plus medics who have not been bought. The health industry as a whole, and that includes government agencies in the health area, work to pharma's agenda because they pay the bills. What pharma wants, it gets, because billions of dollars says so.
They will kill you for a dollar in the blink of an eye. Only they actually get several thousand for killing you, so it's well worth it.
I may have it printed on t-shirts. (But I am not a vendor, just a rather vocal user.) 
