Yes, we definitely do.
I think that if you only do what there are studies supporting (if it was possible), you would end up a pretty big mess.
you can only observe a really small sample of people in your own life.
But, they are also close to your own life - similar conditions. When 9 smokers die of lung cancer and 1 lives, do you tell your child to smoke, because they might be the one that survives?
I think banning things can totally work, but it has to make sense, it has to have wide support and it has to be enforced appropriately. Australia has dramatically changed drinking and driving culture in two decades - that's incredible... but it took a massive investment in Police and Booze buses and a huge public education process - and road fatalities have dropped significantly. Not to zero obviously, and cars are safer than they were, but it's an incredible achievement.
Have you ever considered whether it was worth all the cost and energy? What other problems could have been tackled with the same money? Perhaps it might have had a better impact spent in another place.
I'm not super sure what you're saying here... but I think it's important that studies are peer-reviewed and replicable, and that other researchers challenge them with their own studies. There's ways to catalog it all so that it all contributes to ever-expanding human knowledge.
No, I absolutely wouldn't... but I also don't think many things in life are this clear cut or neat. I think it took much longer and a lot more data to determine the negative effects of second-hand smoke for example, because that wasn't as obvious.
Life is messy, there are millions of variables all the time, so I think the more information and the more research the better.
Absolutely! Everyone is going to have opinions on the efficacy and priority of an exercise like this... but this is where collecting as much data and research can help us determine if it was successful, if it was cost-effective and compare it to other exercises. Once you've got the data and information, only then can we really discuss if the effort was worth the reduction in road fatalities and injuries.