Smoking is disgusting.
So is pavement pizza and beer breath. Your point?
Moderate drinking may actually have some positive health benefits.
You believe that, and it's the smoking industry that's built upon a lie? Alcohol is a toxin. Full stop. Some of the tanins in red wine, and red wine alone, are considered to be beneficial to one's health, but they can be extracted from grapes, grape juice or pommegranate juice (and maybe cranberries, too, I'm not sure).
(...) but I hope that this write-up has at least pointed out some of the more striking contrasts between these two activities.
How? How exactly did you mean to do that, since you never made a comparison between the two activities or even mentioned drinking other than prefunctorily in the closing paragraph? Is this you idea of a blow struck for objectivity?
Alcohol, though a great social facilitator, is a toxic, dangerous substance which causes millions of deaths, either through disease or violence, every year. It is a truly unnatractive habit that turns grown men and women into slobbering cretins without a shred of dignity. Attempting to justify it by jumping on the anti-smoking bandwagon is monumentally moronic.