>>1464875>spending so much money on slow painful deathsSmoking tobacco will not result in death and itself offers a number of benefits such as elevating cognition and ameliorating depressive symptoms. There are mechanisms inherent to it that may even prolong lifespan such as lowering of IGF-1 levels and KLOTO induction.
The entire case that tobacco smoking causes cancer rests solely on soft studies, nothing more than statistical inferences, which are especially suspect as they are contradicted by hard evidence. The overwhelming majority of studies and data that "prove" that tobacco causes cancer are from non randomized, epidemiological studies in which the participants are self-selected, inherently biasing the smokers and relatives of now dead smokers, to come forth. Not to mention, these studies seldom correct for other variables like diet, exercise, lifestyle factors and most importantly, occupational-hazard which are far more damning suspects.
>>1464961>Do you think anyone who smokes doesn't already know they're killing themselves?This is yet another reason why epidemiological studies are so flawed...if you have a population of individuals that actually believes that smoking is so bad that they are "killing themselves", then they do not give a damn about their health, period, and from this population the candidates sampled are going to inherently predisposed to increased mortality rates. Thus, the population of smokers in 2019 in the US, or hell from the past 20 years, is abysmal. We're talking people who are overweight, have an extremely poor diet, who do not give the slightest fuck about their health. This (and better methodology) is why the Japanese studies of the 1990s and 2000s created such alarm that they were and still are referred to as the Japanese Paradox. Yes, the health conscious Japanese smokers exhibited a tenth of the instances of cancer and showed no statistically significant cardiovascular risk factor.
