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Claimed dangers of tobacco are mostly a result of propaganda
As no cause-effect connection has ever been established between tobacco use and any of the 101 ailments it has been epidemiologically associated with, the latest bout of demonisation which tobacco is currently receiving leaves me decidedly unimpressed. For example, despite 50+ years of subjecting many different laboratory animals (such as dogs, monkeys, rats, mice, and so on) to enormous amounts of tobacco smoke – in one instance laboratory mice were forced to inhale the human equivalent of 62 packs of cigarettes a day – no animal has ever developed lung cancer. For another example, in the USA, where all the furore started back in the ‘fifties’, whilst the number of people using tobacco has dropped from approx. 50% of the population back then to approx. 25% nowadays the incidence of lung cancer has risen, not fallen.
What is of particular note is that the cause of liver cancer, cervical cancer, throat cancer and stomach cancer has recently been discovered to be bacterial/viral, all the while that tobacco was being blamed and valuable research dollars were being allocated elsewhere, and some preliminary research is showing indications that bacteria/viruses might also be the cause of lung cancer ... and maybe even heart disease.
Also, the figures published claiming, say, 350,000 deaths in a given year from tobacco-related diseases are not figures derived from a body-count – there are no such dead bodies in graves to count – as they are 350,000 (or whatever) phantom deaths generated by a computer programme such as SAMMEC II ... meaning that it is the epidemiological data that is fed into the computer which determines the statistical deaths the programme prints out.
Lastly (as I have no interest in belabouring the subject) those graphic photographs showing a slimy-black cancerous lung, labelled ‘smoker’s lung’, and a shiny-pink healthy lung, labelled ‘non-smoker’s lung’, are nothing but propaganda: the slimy-black lung should read ‘cancerous lung’ (and could very well be a non-smoker’s lung) and the shiny-pink lung should read ‘healthy lung’ (and could very well be a smoker’s lung) as it is impossible for a pathologist to determine, from both gross and microscopic examination of lung tissue, whether a person who died from other causes (such as a vehicular accident) is a smoker or a non-smoker.
The following URL covers all this and much more: https://lcolby.myvtoronte.com/
Seeing as exposure to pretty much any form of smoke in an enclosed space, whether it's from a wood-burning stove, dung fires in poor countries, exhaust fumes, or just plain ol' fire is associated with elevated cancer risk, your claims are resting on quicksand. Whether repeatedly inhaling tobacco smoke is worse for you than repeatedly inhaling any other form of smoke might be an interesting question, but the difference in exposure levels from that method versus all the rest would make it a bad idea even if tobacco smoke were somehow less carcinogenic than other kinds.
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For all the people reporting @Sky's posts, I'm 50/50 on serious schizo-poster or troll. @ZorbaTHut has always leaned towards letting people bring their craziest hot takes to the Motte to be dissected and torn apart; we generally only "censor" a post if it's clearly bad faith, or if it violates one of our discourse rules.
@Sky, my dude, I don't know if you really believe these things or if you're just seeing how many Flat Earth arguments you can get away with making, but if you keep dropping posts like this without any actual engagement, my priors will shift towards "Hit and run trolling from SneerClub" and I will stop clicking the "approve" button.
I’m interested in this one for what its worth.
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I am perfectly willing to buy that tobacco smoke is not as bad for you as commonly believed.
However, "cigarettes don't cause cancer" doesn't pass the smell test. There's so much added crap in cigs that obviously something causes cancer. And the vast majority of tobacco smoking is cigarettes, so to claim that tobacco isn't related to health problems is contrarian to the point of insanity.
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It's unlikely the same person would just happen to sincerely post this and a bogus post about black body radiation and global warming, and about an ideal world, three totally unrelated subjects, except that posting something wrong is a sure way to stir the pot and get responses.
He's a troll. Please stop responding to him.
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As far as I can tell this is false. See here for early attempts (some successful) and here for a more recent review, including claims like:
There may be adjacent true claims, like "inducing lung cancer in animal models via tobacco smoke is surprisingly difficult". But there's something of a chasm between "surprisingly difficult" (which would still be evidence of causation) and "not accomplished" (which is not the claim supported by recorded research.)
I think you mean well, but contrarianism is not interesting on its own.
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Is black lung disease a myth too? Asbestos? Which other particulate/fume inhalation-caused deseases are they also lying about?
black lung disease and asbestos aren't a myth, therefore what about tobacco and lung cancer?
I've read that asbestos damage is really aggravated by smoking. It seems plausible that smoking might not be that bad if you can avoid all other pollutants and respitory infections. But that doesn't seem possible to do.
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I mean, that's the question, right?
We know inhaling particulates can cause a wide variety of lung problems through a wide variety of mechanisms. Smoke and dust are not good for the lungs. Why would we expect cigarette smoke to be an exception?
you're flipping the direction and standard of proof for a proposition; a person who says the correlative studies aren't cause-effect isn't making the positive claim that tobacco has no effects
one contrarian belief is difficult enough to defend against status quo piling on of people who likely have next to zero actual familiarity with any of the evidence in this case, but you go further and attempt to get them to defend entirely different things in order to give an opportunity for more bullying/sneering and argument by attrition where you levy onto them even more levels of effort and ink spilling
it's akin to a person who has some conspiracy theory about x and then attempting to get them to defend big foot or chemicals making the frogs gay or whatever else (edit: looking back this is unfair as there is a much stronger connection between the situations you talked about and tobacco than rando conspiracy theory x to rando conspiracy theory y/z)
I'm attempting to learn how far their contrarianism extends. If they agree that other particulates, smokes, fumes and vapors cause lung diseases and cancers, then that begs the question why tobacco smoke in particular should be the exception. if they think black lung and silicosis and so on are likewise myths, well, that is useful information.
it's a good argument tactic on the interwebs
the reason it's good is because it requires little effort or knowledge on your part and shifts the burden onto them for disbelief instead of where it correctly lays which is on the person making the positive case against tobacco in the first place
The first question in any conversation is "is my opposite speaking in good faith?" In doubtful cases, reasonable questions that answer that question, preferably without being rude, are highly beneficial.
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While this is very scholarly, upon reflection let me say:
Fuck you.
My late mother smoked pretty much all her life, tried and failed to stop smoking various times, and over the years I could see that the amount she smoked increased. She tried switching to low-tar cigarettes, but ending up smoking way more of them, presumably to get the same effect. EDIT: My father, on the other hand, smoked but succeeded in quitting and lived to be 81 before he died of an unrelated illness.
Eventually she got lung cancer. It was diagnosed very late, partly as a result of her reluctance to go to the doctor until the symptoms were undeniable (coughing up black phlegm in the mornings) and partly because the tumour was behind her shoulder blade so they didn't pick it up on x-rays until it was too big and too late for anything.
They offered her chemotherapy as more of a sop than any hope it would do anything; the first bout of it made her so sick that she refused any more, and the doctors said "yeah, it wouldn't do anything anyway".
I saw her die of it. It is a horrible, painful, wretched way to die, even with morphine as a palliative.
So maybe, yeah, maybe it's all propaganda that tobacco gives you cancer. But if some fool reads this, and starts smoking, and gets cancer, that is a miserable and avoidable death.
So, once again, Fuck. You.
And don't try to tell me she didn't die of lung cancer or that the smoking didn't cause it or any bullshit. Like your stupid-ass example of "if someone is killed in a car crash, it's not because they smoked so that shouldn't be counted as tobacco-related death" - who the fuck is counting "died in a car crash" as "died from smoking"?
I'm going to cut you some slack here (i.e., not give you a timeout) because there is a strong possibility the OP is a troll, but still, you know better than this. How many times have you been told you don't get to just start cursing people out because you're offended?
When it comes to denying the facts of what KILLED MY MOTHER, I think we're past "being offended" and into "if you said that to my face, you'd get punched in the mouth" territory.
Hit me with a ban and let him continue shit-posting. I don't care at this stage. But he/she/it/they are a fucking liar and I won't eat dogshit and call it chocolate, all in the name of "play nicely, children".
It's almost funny, to see how from the above how I could skirt around a ban on a technicality of "we're not quite sure you're a troll, so we'll keep on letting you shit-post". But on this one topic I am not going to be sweet and calm.
This is about "this thing kills people". I already see young people going back to the notion that tobacco smoking is cool and edgy and trendy. At least some of them will develop a smoking habit, and at least some of them will die from that. And die painful, miserable, awful deaths.
So pardon me if I tread on Sky's toes and their oh-so-edgy "it's all propaganda", while I have a grave of someone who died from not-propaganda to visit.
He is an obvious crank (or troll pretending to be a crank) making terrible arguments, but your response is not a good one. I doubt there is anyone here who finds his arguments convincing, but if there was your post would not be a good reason to think otherwise. There are many people who believe that, for instance, they have lost a family member to the COVID-19 vaccine because he had a stroke months later or something. Many millions of people say they lost a family member to the vaccine if we go by the survey a while back and assume not all of them were people misreading the question (unfortunately I didn't save a link, it might have been posted here or somewhere else like Zvi's blog), implying numbers that are completely insane unless we assume that all the official studies and statistics are outright fake. For that matter, there are plenty of people who will tell you stories like "my father got the vaccine and had a heart-attack days later", something which is biologically plausible to attribute to the vaccine, and yet even then the statistics probably work out such that it is a coincidence most of the time. Their anger at vaccination-supporters for killing people they loved, though based on far weaker evidence, is in many cases just as sincere and wholehearted as yours. Those personal experiences and feelings aren't a convincing argument when they use them, and they don't become a convincing argument just because you are supporting a position that happens to actually be true.
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No, it is not this one topic. You do this on every topic that gets under your skin.
Answer me this: people are posting all the time about how Jews are cancer, the Holocaust is a hoax, blacks are low IQ criminals, trans people are mentally ill degenerates, women should be property, fascism is good, leftists are moral mutants who should be disenfranchised, etc.
Do you believe someone personally affronted by any of those themes (like, say, by being Jewish, or black, or trans, or a leftist) would be justified in throwing fuck yous at the OP and ignoring our discourse rules? Would you yell at me for modding them?
If not, then please explain why it's different for you.
If so, then fine, you would prefer that we just let people curse each other out when they're sufficiently riled. This is a position a number of people have advocated over the years. It's fine to want the Motte to be more of a free for all where we don't enforce civility. Take it up with Zorba; maybe the umpteenth petition will convince him that's how it should be. But right now, that's not how it is.
You want it one way, but it's the other way. You know how it is, so please stop acting the martyr when you very deliberately break the rules.
It's not. Your house, your rules, and I knew what I was getting into when I signed up.
I like The Motte, I like (most of) you, I like the principles behind this place, I like what you are trying to do. And I do believe in free speech, so I'm not asking for bans or demanding this place is run how I want it/like it or, worst of all, issuing ultimatums along the lines of "him or me, choose!"
I've mocked people for flouncing off, so consider this karma or just retribution or what you will. Whether we call it the Wheel of the Law or the Wheel of Fortune, it turns inexorably and inescapably and we are all bound to it.
Yes. See "committed to free speech" above. Sky is perfectly entitled to tell me go fuck myself if offended by what I said to them. I realise the mods don't want this place to degenerate into exchanges of insults, but sometimes "fuck you" is the bon mot.
"Acting the martyr"? Maybe that is indeed what I'm doing. But you, Amadan, said to me that "you don't get to just start cursing people out because you're offended".
I wish to God I was only "offended". That would be so much easier and less painful. I'm not offended, Amadan, I'm flayed raw. It's been ten years since my mother's death, and it still hurts to think of it.
So to hell with it, if I'm playing the martyr, let me play it to the hilt.
She was diagnosed in February and dead by June. She died hard, and fearfully. She said to me "I don't want to die", but what could I say? This was fatal, we all knew it. Over that period of five months, she went from an active woman to a wizened, aged thing that could barely sit upright in a chair. She hated hospitals, so we kept her at home as long as we could.
Morphine patches helped, but when they were sufficient to keep the pain down (not gone, just down), they left her groggy and limp-muscled, and rendered her doubly incontinent because she wasn't able to alert us in time or get out of her bed to use toilet facilities. As you can imagine, this was humiliating for a woman who had always been private and independent.
When we cut back on the medication so she was more with-it, the pain was unbearable. I don't know if you've had to listen to someone moaning and whimpering in pain for hours while you're desperately applying morphine patches and hoping they'll build up fast again in her blood stream, while waiting for the ambulance to come and take her into hospital for the final days she has left.
Oh, and talking of hospitals: because it was so urgent, she was taken in by our shitty local hospital instead of the regional hospital. We were warned about this, but we knew it already: the matron had a reputation for stealing from the patients, so my sister took off my mother's wedding ring and kept it safe.
Imagine that: having to take the wedding ring off a dying woman's finger because the medical staff will rob her corpse.
Well, the end wasn't long after she went in; they had her on pain control, so she was semi-conscious at best, and unaware of where she was, what was happening, and so on. She lasted a day or so and then the end, which by then was a mercy.
Is that enough "playing" for you, Amadan?
So this shit-for-brains comes to piss on my mother's grave, and I yell at him, and you grab me by the elbow to rebuke me. Heaven forfend I use harsh language to someone pissing on my mother's corpse!
I am genuinely sorry not to be able to comply with your requirements, but I also genuinely cannot.
However. Your house, your rules. I don't need to be here, and you don't need me to be here. At the end, I'm here for entertainment and fun. When it stops being fun, time to go. I wish all of you the best and success in your endeavours, guys and gals and those of you what ain't too sure. I'm not flouncing out because I'm too dispirited to flounce, let's say I'm slinking away.
And you are all completely, positively, absolutely entitled to mock me for flouncing/slinking off when I got my knuckles rapped.
Good night, good luck, and good bye to you all. Let's have one for the road, the deoch an dorais.
Look, I'm sorry about your mother, really, and I understand that this subject hit a nerve for you. I don't even blame you for losing it and telling the OP to fuck off. But we can't make exceptions for every person who feels personally aggrieved. You admit yourself that you understand why the rules are the way they are, so basically, you did it knowing it would get you modded. And ffs, all I did was tell you "Stop that."
I do not think this is cause for you to decide you're not wanted here. I, for one, will be sad to see you go. But I'm not going to beg you to stay.
I hope you change your mind, or that you return after you've cooled off.
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I love it how our female commentariat is so easily identifiable.
What an insightful comment, males are truly superior, tell me which group you think is biologically inferior and evil this week? Asians? Jews? Women? Anyone not a white guy? You are very smart and cool
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This reads as nothing more than a low-effort dig - "Haha, women so hysterical, amirite?"
Don't do this.
You're also just plain wrong. I assure you, I get the most outrageous hissy fits thrown at me regularly by male posters indignant about being modded.
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Strongly disagree. Every long-time contributor who flames out and gets a lengthy ban follows a similar arc, male or female. They're fine discussing [X monstrous idea] and [Y monstrous idea] from a cool remove. Then one day, someone brings up [Z monstrous idea], and it hits a little too close to home. Suddenly, themotte.org playing nicey-nice with prevaricating evil is unacceptable.
It's a reaction for which I have negative respect. That said, no one has found my [Z] yet.
Yes, this has nothing to do with the uterus.
But no, I think you've misdiagnosed the issue here. Our resident Irishwoman's threshold for "cool remove" vs. "righteous indignation" is set a bit differently than most of the commentariat. I remember when she pissed off an "enlightened being" to the point he threatened breaking her arm. Point is, if I had to pick one person who wouldn't prevaricate on evil...
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Yeah, I'm wanting to agree, here. Still anecdotal, but of my 6 grandparents (my parents remarried,), 5 died between the ages of 58 and 71 (most of them around 60), and 1 died at 88 when COVID19 and COPD got him simultaneously. The latter was the only one who did not smoke, and was all the only one not to die a slow and painful death drowning in his own fluids. There could be some other confounding factor, but the smoking is the one difference that sticks out. So the more statistically literate hereabouts will I hope understand my vehement doubt of Sky's claim.
Of course, between this and the climate change post, it feels like someone opened a portal to 1999 and summoned the right wing equivalent to the IFLS SJWs of the past decad", so the combination might have me more biased than usual.
You said that a lot more nicely than I did 😁 Thank you for being someone who independently offered testimony about why Sky is [redacts thing that will make Amadan go 'tut-tut'].
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Similar to the way in which falsely convicting a person of murder lets a murderer get away, falsely laying the blame on tobacco for any number of sprawling diseases let's the real or primary cause go unaddressed.
and beliefs/reactions like yours are part of the reason stupid status quo narratives built of straw continue for decades causing avoidable death and suffering
it's a stupid status quo narrative built of straw, eh? Then I welcome you to develop a heavy smoking habit for thirty years. As you say, it won't do you a particle of harm and you can laugh at me at the end of that period when you don't have bad health and a condition that will kill you.
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The smoking like a chimney -> lung cancer connection is pretty darned well established.
Without looking up anything: If you had to guess what % of people who smoke for at least 10 years develop lung cancer in older age, what do you think it would be?
The early studies which started the public health trend were trash. They take a situation where large portions of the population smoked cigarettes and then divined a tobacco cause when any number of other uncontrolled variables confound the ridiculous correlations they "find." It's akin to seeing a low class mortality correlation and then picking out any number of low class behaviors to "blame."
But that's really a separate discussion from the comment to which I responded which was akin to "I believe x and fuck you for questioning it because I have emotional trauma around it. Also, you're partly to blame for 'unnecessary death" for pointing out various odd observation which bring into question that belief."
10 years? 10 years is rookie smoking. Both my relatives who died of lung cancer smoked for over 50 years.
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Meta: what is it with like half of top-level posts being provocative nonsense? This is a big problem. Mods, I think «low effort» would be better than this.
Are you a smoker? Are you personally convinced by what you write and cite? Are you willing to bear responsibility for convincing anyone of your case? Would you donate your organs to a mottizen who has lost his own as a consequence of trusting you?
For the record, I have a nicotine patch on my skin right now, and regularly use alternative nicotine-delivery methods, believe there's something to the quip that greatness declined when the anti-smoking campaigns gained power in the 2nd half of the 20th century (who was it again?). By the same token, I am not maximally negative on gout.
Some in my family, some of the most important people to me, died of causes obviously exacerbated by smoking cigarettes; Russia is a country of heavy smokers and short male lifespans; tobacco smoke is indelibly low-class-coded in my olfactory bulb. Such are my biases.
Your link includes this chapter on risk:
This is just sad – picking on the weakman when purporting to debunk mainstream. Whatever properties nicotine has or doesn't have, you are trying to defend tobacco, and so does this Colby dude. Gwern:
That's just one random piece of your source, going poof.
I think the evidence is overwhelming – the genetic data, the life expectancy effect, the lung cancer incidence rate, and many other clear indicators pointing in the same direction. Using gwern's words again (now from his section on HBD) «the persistence of the debate reflects more what motivated cognition can accomplish and the weakness of existing epistemology and debate». If causality between smoking and adverse health outcomes cannot be conclusively shown, this is an indictment of our methods and perhaps our scientific institutions, not the hypothesis.
But on the level of pure observation: the physical enfeeblement and accelerated aging of smokers, their inability to move well for prolonged time (very annoying for fit people, even though most are too polite to state it directly), their stench, their yellow teeth and cracked skin, all of those correlates of unwellness are so obvious to the naked eye, it can well compete with obesity in how ridiculous and self-clowning it is to downplay. Yes, there are generally healthy obese people, I suppose. (I'd guess they'd be superhuman if not for all the extra adipose tissue). No, there is zero chance obesity doesn't make them worse off. Likewise for smoking.
In people, I greatly admire φιλοσοφία, the love of wisdom; and wisdom is necessarily grounded in truth. An obese person can be pitied for his plight, or respected for coping with it, or even for embracing the hedonism, social conventions be damned. But an obese person who is in denial about the cost of his lifestyle is lacking character to such an extent it'd be a waste of time to engage on any level sans the most superficial, I believe; I would never let such a person play a role in my life that I wouldn't entrust to a journalist or a hooker. Likewise with smokers.
Or might this be just a bit where you are hinting at some other risible delusion, just a more popular one, perhaps? Or something like COVID-masks-and vaccines stuff again?
Please be plain.
The standards for top-level posts are such that anyone posting such has a good chance to get modded. The people posting nonsense don't care, though.
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I have to step out, so I don't have time to dig in at the moment, but this attribution seems immediately suspect to me. My anecdotal experience with travel in Spain and France is that smoking is much more common in both countries than in the United States. I seem to recall the self-reported data matching up with that. If someone tells me that French people live longer than Americans because they don't smoke as much, I find myself doubting their motivation for the claim.
People in Southern Europe tend to smoke a lot, but they are also comically thin in comparison to people in the US. I have been in Southern Europe for a few days (far more often in the past) and this trip I haven't seen a single obese person yet. I have only seen a small number of fat people, all of them middle-aged or old women. Diets tend to be pretty good, both in terms of quantities and qualities, even though people tend to be epicures about their food - it's possible to eat very well and healthily enough. People walk around a lot and have at least decent cardiovascular health.
Stress levels are higher than stereotypes would suggest, but people are generally better socialised than most places and have both rich family connections (one Southern European friend was shocked that I only talk with my parents once per week normally) and extensive friend networks (a Southern European college town's nightlife is one of life's great joys). Grown women will walk arm-in-arm with their mothers or friends, while the men are far more adept at platonic expressions of affection with each other than most places. This is true even in some of the more reserved parts of Southern Europe, e.g. most of Northern Italy.
Since most people who smoke don't get lung cancer, even though smoking very probably causes lung cancer, it's hardly surprising that high rates of smoking don't have an easily noticeable impact on Southern European life expectancy.
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It is a poison; one of the favourite murder methods in Golden Age detective fiction was the gardener using nicotine spray for the roses, and that nicotine being snaffled to poison the victim.
So is caffeine if lethal in relatively small doses = poison.
It's pretty irrelevant, given that people generally aren't taking large enough doses to die.
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Not all poisons are necessarily carcinogens and mutagens (which requires their mechanism of action to target the nucleus, and this is not how nicotine produces its effects); nor are all poisons meaningfully poisonous in low doses.
It's true that nicotine can be pretty damn lethal, of course.
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Do particles from tobacco smoke not accumulate in the lungs? Is it not possible to examine the concentration of these particles and determine with reasonable certainty whether or not the person was a smoker?
P.S. Before dropping another scorching hot take, it would be wise to address the replies the first hot take received. Otherwise, everyone will assume you're just here to troll. That's certainly the conclusion I'm leaning towards.
Thanks for the advice. I do intend to address them soon (you will note that I did indeed already post a response to one of them). I'm not used to social media. Usually I take my time and give the other people's responses as much time and attention as I can such as to provide a response that is beneficial to all involved. I do like to be elaborate. So please be patient with me.
These were just two posts I've already written over a week ago while waiting to be posted here.
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As a person who is receptive to hearing unorthodox arguments, can I give you a suggestion?
Tell me the story of why, assuming the evidence you present is correct, that all the authorities for the last 50 years have been fooled. What evidence do the experts see that you are not telling me? Why have they been so consistently wrong?
That's one thing that makes Scott such a great writer. He preemptively thinks of criticisms and then addresses them. He looks at things from multiple angles and has a theory of mind about the people who espouse different beliefs. If we believe that the things you say are true, then must we also believe that three generations of doctors and scientists are either stupid or evil? That's a high bar to clear.
I'm not going to comment on the substance of your argument as I don't see anything that would make it worthy of consideration. One could write a similar polemic espousing a belief that the world is flat. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
I'd like to reply to this part, after 3 years of covid public health measures by all the top doctors and scientists , it's not hard to believe that the so called experts are stupid and evil
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