This year in the U.S., THREE TIMES as many non-smokers will die as smokers! Over 1 MILLION non-smokers!

Unlike almost all of what you hear about smoking, those statements are TRUE… tricky, but true. Of course 3 times as many non-smokers will die, since there are 3 times as many non-smokers.

Here's an example of the sort of bunk you can hear from sources we should be able to believe:

Each year, smoking kills more people than AIDS, alcohol, drug abuse, car crashes, murders, suicides, and fires-combined. Cigarette smoking accounts for about 434,000 deaths, or one fifth of all deaths in the United States with an annual cost of more than $50 billion in direct medical costs.

That statement is from the Anchorage Department of Health and Human Services, but they didn't make it up, they just repeated it. Smoking kills certainly sounds like smoking CAUSES 400,000 deaths each year, doesn't it?

Wonder where the numbers come from? What they do is this:

1. Take a list of diseases that are "associated with" smoking.

2. Total the number of people who die from each disease.

So… if a higher percentage of smokers die from prostate cancer than non-smokers (that's a correlation), then all the deaths from prostate cancer are declared "caused by" smoking, and count toward the 400,000+ number.

The fact is that we don't know what CAUSES most diseases. In order to claim that something CAUSES a disease, one has to know HOW it causes it… what actually happens. The truth is that many diseases probably have multiple causes.

Another important truth is about "confounding factors". When we say that smokers die younger than non-smokers (they do), it's also relevant to point out that people who smoke have lower average incomes than non-smokers. They also tend to live in poorer neighborhoods (which have less-clean air), they have dirtier and more dangerous jobs, don't eat as well, drink more alcohol… and many other characteristics that "confound" the association.

It's almost certainly true that if all of the current smokers NEVER smoked, you could still come up with the same "number of deaths"… because of all of the other factors true of that group.

It's like saying because Democrats don't live as long as Republicans, that being a Democrat kills.

"Associated with" means "occurs together with." It does not imply causality. For instance, according to the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Alliance, SIDS is associated with being born twins or triplets. This does not mean that being born twins or triplets causes SIDS. Likewise, just because some of the diseases listed on the MMWR are associated with smoking (e.g., pneumonia and influenza) doesn't mean that smoking caused those deaths.

Almost half of the relative risks used are less than 2. That means only a slightly higher percentage of smokers. According to the National Cancer Institute,

" ... relative risks of less than 2 are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret ... Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident."

The bottom line?

Maybe smoking causes some disease… truth is, we don't know. The numbers bantered around about smoking deaths are statistical nonsense… they prove nothing… except that we've been badly deceived for a long time.

Why have we been deceived? That's complex, but there are a whole lot of other agendas at work here, not the least of which is raising membership money for a "good cause". Another more serious reason is covering up the fact that we're still waiting for medical cures that were promised long ago. It's easier to blame it on smoking.

I've been talking about FIRST-HAND SMOKING… not second-hand or ETS (environmental tobacco smoke). If you're still having difficulty in believing that we been so deceived about the danger of smoking, then the baloney about second-hand smoke should convince you just how deceptive the same sources can be.

If there is no proof that first-hand smoke kills, how can there be proof that second-hand smoke kills?

Read what the Congressional Research Service said:

In response to a request from the US Congress, the Congressional Research Service undertook an analysis of the potential health effects of ETS. In particular, the analysis looked at the work on ETS which has appeared since the publication of the EPA's findings. Four studies in particular were examined -- Kabat, Fontham, Brownson, Stockwell .

Of these studies, two show no increased average risk (Kabat and Brownson), one shows a barely statistically significant risk (Fontham), and one shows an increased average risk which is nonetheless not statistically significant at 95% confidence level (Stockwell).

Moreover, if we have to take the Fontham study, which alone of these four shows a statistically significant average increased risk, and as the relevant question about the degree of risk suggested, then in the words of the Congressional Research Service the chance of dying of lung cancer over one's lifetime "for a person exposed only to background ETS, the number drops to about 7/100 of one percent [19]. Moreover, using data from the Brownson study, "there are no annual lung cancer deaths from ETS."

From 'Passive Smoking' and Public Policy, by John Luik

"The annual death rate from lung cancer among non-smoking wives of non-smoking men is of the order of six per 100,000. Among non-smoking wives of smoking men the corresponding figure is eight per 100,000. Thus two in every 99,994 non-smoking wives of smoking husbands die of lung cancer that, it is claimed, should be attributed to the effects of passive smoking".

An anti-smoker would surely claim that the danger is one-third higher (8 instead of 6), in an attempt to make it sound horrendous.

The MASTERS of statistical manipulation

the Environmental Protection Agency's 1993 report is still being quoted, even though the EPA's findings were ruled null and void in 1998 by U.S. District Judge William Osteen who found that the Agency manipulated the data in order to arrive at a desired and predetermined conclusion.

As reported in the Washington Post, July 19, 1998, "A federal judge has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency wrongly declared secondhand tobacco smoke a dangerous carcinogen in a landmark 1993 report.

Here's a summary of what John Luik found in the EPA report:

a careful look at the EPA's ETS claims clearly shows why this science can be called nothing other than corrupt science in that it uses highly selected data, data that are then further manipulated in breach of accepted scientific norms, all without cogent explanation, to reach the 'right' conclusion, an examination of the process underlying this 'science' demonstrates even more clearly its wholly corrupt character. There are at least nine specific process issues worth noting, each of which highlights a slightly different dimension of the corrupted character of the EPA's ETS science.

Many other studies have been done on the effect of second-hand smoke, and there simply is nothing of significance.

The "second-hand smoke" claim was originally perpetrated because all the scare tactics about smoking didn't succeed in making many people stop smoking. Scaring the NON-smokers, who then attacked the smokers, has been much more successful. Taken all together, over a period of several decades, the deceptions about smoking may well be the biggest fraud in history.

I like simple explanations, and there are a few hiding in this morass of statistical trickery. One I like is to toss out is… how it's possible that other nations with far more smoking than the U.S. can still have lower rates of disease… the same diseases that we claim are caused by smoking?

As John Stossel would say... "Give Me a Break!"