The anti-Marlboro man

Ever since Mike Bloomberg’s hotly contested but ahead-of-its-time 2002 workplace smoking ban, this has not been a very fun city in which to put lit match to tobacco. Now, courtesy of Mayor de Blasio and the City Council, it’s set to get still more expensive and unpleasant.

All to the good. Tune out the tired grousing about a nanny state — because the discouragement of cigarette smoking, and vaping to boot, will pay major dividends in lives saved from misery, disease, death and shared health costs.

Cigarettes are a legal product. But because they are also a lethal product, they are heavily regulated, as they serve no purpose except to hook people to a powerful addiction.

One that results in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a progressive condition that makes it ever harder to breathe.

Escalates risk for stroke and coronary heart disease. Causes cancer — lung, pancreatic, stomach, bladder and more.

And even hurts people who don’t opt to take a single drag; the rationale for the smoking ban was to protect employees working in smoke-filled establishments from bars to restaurants to offices.

Those stupid little tubes are still responsible for nearly half a million annual American deaths, more than illegal drug use, alcohol use, car accidents and gun violence combined.

Led by Bloomberg, who looked at the data and boldly went to war, taking all kinds of guff along the way, New York City has driven down its cancer-stick-sucking rates.

Before the smoking ban, more than one in five New Yorker adults were lighting up. Now, it’s down to about one in seven.

Which still adds up to roughly 900,000 people, including some 15,000 teenagers.

The de Blasio assault, Bloombergian in the best sense of the word, hits at all sides of the problem with a decidedly more-realistic-than-Vision-Zero goal of cutting smoking rates to 12% by 2020.

Minimum prices for tobacco products, now $10.50 for a pack of cigarettes, will rise to $13. While that will no doubt breathe new life into an already healthy black market that needs to be snuffed out, the 23% hike should force at least some smokers — or would-be smokers — to think twice.

A city with a high density of tobacco retail licenses will wisely cut those in half by attrition, so that over time it becomes that much harder to find a place to get your fix.

All apartment buildings will have to create and post a smoking policy so that residents know whether lighting up on the premises is allowed.

The newest battlefront: vaping and e-cigs that are, for some, a smoke-free alternative to cigarettes but that have become for too many young people a thought-to-be-harmless nicotine delivery system.

Some 16% of New York City adolescents suck in the heated liquids, utterly unregulated chemicals that have yet to be subjected to any rigorous health studies.

De Blasio would require a retail license to sell e-cigs — with the number capped off the bat.

It all makes smoking a hassle, just quit. Your family will be grateful. And trust us: It really doesn’t look that cool.