>>1525150The Indians also had an average life expectancy of like 35. Most of them didn't live long enough to get cancer, and even if they did, they wouldn't necessarily have made the connection to tobacco, especially if instead of lung cancer, it were, for instance, pancreatic cancer.
And like
>>1525851 says, they weren't chain smoking, and may well not have been inhaling the smoke.
It's also well established that here's a BIG difference in the cancer risk between moderate pipe use and heavy cigarette use (with cigars falling in-between, but closer to the pipe end). As for smokeless: traditional dry snuff has no demonstrated cancer risk, snus and American-style dip/chew probably have some (although studies disagree), but if they do it's even less than cigars, and definitely far less than cigarettes (of course, cancer aside, dipping is still bad for your teeth and gums).
Part of the reason why it's hard to nail down just how much risk tobacco use creates is that it's not just lung cancer, or even oral cancers, that we have to look at. It could very well be remote things like pancreatic cancer (as was suggested by one study with regard to snus, although other studies have rejected the link).
Science is crystal clear that inhaling is the main killer, though. It may well be that some of the things that Big Tobacco puts in their products don't help matters, but at the end of the day the biggest problem is inhaled tar. Filters help, but in the best case they only reduce tar by about half.
