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Notes -
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/
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"?
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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