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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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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/

  • -27

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.

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:

However, in 1997 the first of a series of studies reported that exposure of strain A mice for 5 months to a mixture of 89% cigarette sidestream and 11% mainstream smoke, followed by a month recovery period in air, significantly increased lung tumor multiplicity in strain A mice (Witschi et al. 1997a, 1997b).

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.