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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35525 thread views

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

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:

The reader may ask, "Well, if smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, just what does?". Recent studies suggest that the answer lies in the genes of those individuals who develop the disease.

One must be cautious in assessing the genetic evidence, because molecular biologists, many of whom are employed by the rabidly anti tobacco government establishment, are not above the use of techno-babble in support of the establishment position on smoking. In their book on gene therapy, Altered Fates, authors Jeff Lyon and Peter Gorner quote scientist Philp Leder as saying that nicotine is a "mutagen par excellence". A mutagen, according to them, is another way of saying "carcinogen". There are, however, absolutely no studies showing that nicotine is a carcinogen. If it were, the FDA could scarcely have approved the sale of the nicotine patches, used by smokers who choose to quit smoking.

Quite frankly, I do not know whether there is a risk to smoking, or not. I do know that "risk" is not the same as causation.

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:

All of the harm seems to stem from tobacco, and tobacco smoking in particular; this is not necessarily obvious because almost everyone casually conflates tobacco with nicotine (especially public education programs3), treating them as a single synonymous evil I dub “nicbacco”. When someone or something says that “nicotine” is harmful and you drill down to the original references for their claims, the references often turn out to actually be talking about tobacco rather than nicotine gums or patches45. Other methodological issues include comparing to current smokers rather than former smokers or failing to control for the subjects being the sort of people who would begin such a societally-disapproved activity like smoking; the studies typically aren’t designed properly even for showing an effect: you need a study which finds deficits in smokers but not in non-smokers or former smokers (eg. Heffernan et al 2011 or Sabia et al 2008/⁣Sabia et al 2012 although neither enables nicotine inferences since there was no nicotine-only control group). The 2019 United States outbreak of lung illness linked to vaping products offers a case in point of this prejudice: despite every sign pointing to adulterants added to illegal THC/marijuana vaping fluids by fly-by-night operators rather than nicotine (such as the decades of nicotine vaping by millions of people not causing them to land overnight in hospital ICUs), the outbreak has been used as an excuse to ban legal nicotine vaping fluids instead—which is like banning aspirin as a response to the opiate crisis because they’re both used for pain relief and they both come in pill form, and some OD victims also used aspirin recently, so that makes them pretty much the same thing, right?

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.

There are, however, absolutely no studies showing that nicotine is a carcinogen.

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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