Reply to post:

> Interestingly, tobacco PREVENTS lung cancer, not "causes" it.

> It's HOW you smoke it that changes this risk.

To be clear: if you're a non-smoker, you have a 25% HIGHER chance of lung cancer than a pipe smoker.

Likewise, cigar smokers have 6% lower chance of lung cancer than you.

Richard Doll discovered this. And did his damndest to hide it. The government had to force the data out of him. And then discovered he'd hidden a whole heap of stuff.

Richard Doll, to be clear, is the evangelist who kicked off the whole anti-smoking thing and drove it like a demon. His chance for FAME!. He was a doctor who noticed his lung cancer patients were more likely to be smokers than the population average of smokers. He took that ball and ran with it, banged the armageddon drum (standard tactic for status-/attention-needy people bereft of objective justification), and as a result got himself a serious career and serious attention. After the snowball had been rolling for a while he got some serious serious money to do some PROPER large-scale research. After which he declared his triumphant conclusions, then refused to show his data. Instant black flag, never mind red flag. (Not quite as bad as the chap who hijacked the Paris Accord then literally smashed his disk with a hammer to prevent anyone seeing his data, but it's still up there with the classics.)

He found that:

Pipe smokers have 20% lower chance of lung cancer than non-smokers, cigar smokers 6%.

Only cigarette smokers are the ones who have problems.

.

So it's clearly not tobacco which is the problem. It's how you smoke it.

.

An interesting observation: even drinking coffee/tea too hot regularly, sharply increases your chances of mouth&throat cancer. (Ban them!) Something every pipe smoker will tell you is that pipe smoke is not much hotter than ambient by the time it gets to the mouth. I personally strongly suspect cigarettes (which are only barely tobacco: many chemicals added so they burn: tobacco does not burn ; cigarette "tobacco" takes 1-2 weeks to make, pipe tobacco takes 1-2 years) cause problems due to the heat and the chemicals. A blast of scorching air straight into the lungs.

Even then, the risk is startlingly low compared to the hype. Per the NHS's & WHO's simple record keeping of actual incidence rates.

BTW, the WHO finds 25-30% of lung cancer patients are non-smokers. "Interestingly", the NHS declares 10% publicly, but their internal documents state 25-30%. The NHS also presents smoking vs lung cancer charts based on different years/data. The lung cancer data is nearly a decade older than the smoking rate data. Reason? Lung cancer rates in the UK are going UP, whilst smoking rate continues on its monotonic linear decline. "Whoops".

.

Tobacco also cures tuberculosis, interestingly. "Good for the phthisis", as the pipe-smoking 17C boys put it.