In Gauderman et al. 1997 at pp.208-209 the authors stated:

“The results from these analyses support previous findings that a major gene plays an important role in lung cancer risk. An additional finding not previously observed is that there is no apparent interaction between the putative lung cancer gene and smoking.”


At p.177 the authors wrote:

“[T]he flaws we found in the nicotine research literature are of such magnitude and occur in such a regular fashion that they demand an explanation. A partial list of the methodological shortcomings compiled in this book includes:



I Systematic exclusion of subjects from statistical analyses
Absence of saline control groups for injected drugs
Result-biased selection of number of sessions to test manipulations
Absence of statistical comparisons [...]“
Also, from the same book:

“Thus, nicotine’s role in maintaining the smoking habit bears no similarity to the role played by genuinely addictive drugs such as heroin, barbiturates, alcohol or other drugs to which nicotine is routinely compared.”

In Sommers 1972, Dr Sheldon C Sommers, Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Council for Tobacco Research, a physician specialising in pathology and Clinical Professor of Pathology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and University of Southern California School of Medicine, gave evidence which included this statement, at p.96:

“[S]tatistical mathematics can never prove cause and effect. All they show is a relationship requiring further study, usually experiments in animals, to find out the meaningfulness biologically of this relationship. I really believe that among the active researchers in these fields, there is no great preponderance of feeling that cigarette smoke is carcinogenic.”

In Sommers 1976 Dr Sommers said at p.269:

“Now, as to lung cancer, there is a statistical association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. But at present the nature of the association or whether it is causal are not known. The test of the original Surgeon General’s report [USSG 1964] deals with the difficulties of assigning causality, but the summary and conclusions brush these aside, and assign a causality not demonstrably evident in the text. It is widely known that a statistical association is not by itself proof of causation. A statistical association may point to experiments that will help to determine whether there is cause involved.”

Another:

In Furst 1982 Dr Arthur Furst, Director Emeritus of the Institute of Chemical Biology at the University of San Francisco, said at p.512:

“For many years, I tried to induce lung cancer in animals with cigarette smoke, with no success, despite the most sophisticated smoking machines available. Not only were my colleagues and I unsuccessful, but so was every other investigator. There have been a very small number of published reports of lung cancers occurring in experimental animals during smoke inhalation experiments. Anyone attempting to interpret these as showing that smoking causes lung cancer must understand that animals, like humans, do spontaneously develop lung cancer even in the absence of any suspected carcinogen.”

In explaining his conclusions as at September 2003, Professor Idle said that it was his judgment that cigarette smoking had not been established as a cause of human lung cancer. Indeed, as explained by him, the cause of cancer was unknown. Moreover, the mechanisms by which lung cancer developed were not known. Researchers had not produced squamous cell lung carcinoma in laboratory animals by inhalation exposure to cigarette smoke. No constituent or group of constituents, as they existed in the complex mixture which was cigarette smoke, had been shown to be a cause of lung cancer in smokers. In view of this, it could not be determined whether or not smoking caused lung cancer.

ER WHAT ?

A friend of mine had to see a neurologist.....I report the gist of the consultation

Consultant: you mustn't be around smokers

Patient: I don't allow smoking in my house


Consultant: Just being around smokers would be dangerous for you


Patient: Well, as I said no one smokes in my house, or work, or car

Consultant: SMOKERS ARE BAD FOR YOU WHETHER THEY'RE SMOKING or NOT !!!


I kid you not...this is the sort of mediaeval superstition we are all up against .

The world financial crisis made a dent in sales of premium goods as Cuban cigars, while such smoking bans that each day are more and more spread worldwide are a real bane of the cigar industry.

Habanos is trying to oppose the action by offering various lines of small cigars that can be smoked during a work break and also produce cigars specially created for women smokers.

It was found that Cuba’s premium cigars dominate the world cigar market with 70% of all sales.

However that market share excludes the United States as Cuba’s cigars are prohibited there in accordance with a decades-old trade embargo against the Communist island.

The great domestic demand for lower-quality cigars, which are sold at very low price and are made from tobacco leaves grown elsewhere in the country, haven’t demonstrated the sign of slowing in spite of local smoking bans, which like many other laws, are not fully respected.

Bertrand Russell On Smoking

The London Hospitals study was the first British study to investigate possible causes of the growing epidemic of lung cancer. It was published by Richard Doll and Bradford Hill in 1950. Bradford Hill was a statistician, and Richard Doll was a young doctor. In the study, several hundred lung cancer patients in London hospitals were questioned about their past smoking habits and other behaviours, to see whether any pattern emerged.

Many years later, Sir Richard Doll wrote:

By the time we had data on several hundred patients it was obvious that the principal difference between the patients with and without lung cancer was their smoking habits, and we had to make up our minds whether the association was due to chance, bias, confounding, or to cause and effect. The evidence that led us to conclude that it was due to the last (and which led me to give up smoking in 1949) is described in our first paper... (source)

In fact, the results eventually showed that in 649 cases of lung cancer, 647 were among smokers. . . .

. . . It certainly looked like a very strong case had been made. The lung cancer patients were almost all smokers. It very much looked as if it was smoking that was causing lung cancer. Richard Doll clearly thought so, since he promptly gave up smoking. It also appeared to have convinced Sir George Godber:

Almost half a century ago we learned that smoking was the main cause of lung cancer. Albeit our knowledge in 1950 was so limited,... (source)

Godber was later to become one of the principal instigators of the notion of passive smoking - the idea that smokers not only harmed themselves, but also the people around them. . . .

. . . we ought to ask of the London Hospitals study what fraction of its overall sample population were smokers, for this would give the fraction of lung cancer patients that might be expected to be smokers, if smoking carried no risk.

And this figure is available in Table 4 of the study. There were 2 non-smokers and 647 smokers in the lung cancer study group. And there were 27 non-smokers and 622 smokers in the non-lung-cancer control group. So that, in the study as a whole, 97.7% of patients were smokers. This being so, we would expect that 97.7% of lung cancer patients would also be smokers, if smoking was unconnected to lung cancer. Instead we find that 99.7% of them were smokers. Is that particularly alarming? All we have discovered is that in a population in which nearly everybody smoked, nearly everybody with lung cancer also smoked: which is precisely what would be expected. Just as if nearly all the patients in the London Hospitals study were Londoners, it would be expected that nearly all the lung cancer patients would be Londoners as well.

Looked at this way, the London Hospitals study tells us nothing. If anything, it might even be said to give smoking a clean bill of health.

Nevertheless, when Doll and Hill commenced their next study, the much more well known British Doctors study, the focus was entirely upon smoking. The doctors were only asked about their smoking habits, and about nothing else at all. . . .

bacteria

A few scientists have long held the belief that human cancers might well be caused by bacteria. Not that many years ago doctors were surprised to learn that peptic ulcers and cancers of the gut might actually be caused by acid-resistant bacteria. Why were they surprised? TB a precursor to lung cancer used to be mainly a disease of non-smokers, the tobacco smoke having antiseptic properties, was thought to inhibit susceptibility to TB. In the 60's doctors became alarmed that, with the immense reduction in TB, lung cancer was on the increase in the smoking population. They jumped to the conclusion that cancer was caused by smoking.
How they must be dismayed by recent studies that show that aspirin, another chemical which has bacteria-resistant properties, has been shown to inhibit human cancers.The evidence is there for all to see, bacteria cause a range of diseases in human-beings which lead to cancers.
An aspirin a day, or 5 Player's Weights? Your choice, but I'm waiting for the ban on using aspirin in public places myself.

Smoking

His baton was a Malboro Red.......He'd hold an unlit cigarette an exceedingly long time, until it became fixed in the minds of his audience like a handgun. Then he'd make a grand production of striking a match and bring the flame to the cigarette tip. The next rounded phrase that fell from his mouth would be encased within a dollop of smoke. Then, when he flicked his ash---tap, tap--- everyone leaned forward and watched closely, as if Willie Mays were tapping his bat on the home plate. Something interesting was about to happen. At last, he dropped the burned match into the glass ashtray with a light plink, he delivered the punchline or came to the crucial point, and I was tempted to yell, "Bravo!"

J.R.Moehringer

The Living Longer Myth

We are not living longer, we are just not dying younger

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