MORE INCONVENIENT NUMBERS
Statistics always present one version of reality while leaving out many others. For instance:
antismokers’ increased-risk estimates leave out the fact that a majority of lung cancers happen
within, or beyond, the normal range of death. In other words, if lung cancer is going to get you,
it’ll probably do so around the time when something is going to get you, whether you smoke or
not.


There are also many contradictory statistics out there for those who care to look. Native
Americans have half the rate of lung cancer of white Americans even though they smoke much
more. Very few Chinese women smoke and yet they have one of the highest lung cancer rates
in the world. Lung cancer rates practically everywhere have been rising since about 1930 and in
some cases (e.g. American women) have not peaked yet, despite the fact that smoking rates have
gone steadily down. Japan, one of the world’s heaviest-smoking nations, is also in the top two or
three in life expectancy. Japanese rates of lung cancer and heart disease have nevertheless been
rising for the last 3 decades - at the same time as their smoking rate has gone down. Perhaps
this is because their diet and lifestyle have become increasingly Americanised. I really don’t know.
All I’m saying is that ‘inconvenient’ facts should be investigated, rather than swept under the
carpet.


The more you look into this sort of thing, the murkier it gets. Even the term ‘smoker’ is
defined differently in different studies; some only look at heavy long-term cigarette smokers
(there is very little risk in cigar or pipe smoking anyway) but others define anyone who has
smoked 100 cigarettes in their life as a ‘smoker,’ others count as smokers people who quit 20 years
before, and so on.


Antismokers maintain that smoking is responsible for about 90% of lung cancer deaths.
But the Lung Cancer Alliance, a US lobby group, maintains that a half of lung cancer victims have
never smoked

Smoke, Lies and the Nanny State
It would seem obvious that there’s a big difference between smoking five a day and fifty
a day. Heaven forbid, though, that we should use our own common sense. In fact there is a great
deal of evidence that moderate smoking - up to about ten a day - is not harmful, and indeed has
clear benefits. Apart from pleasure (which current medical thinking deems irrelevant) it relieves
stress, helps with weight control, and protects against or relieves the symptoms of quite a few
diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ulcerative colitis, and cancers of the intestines and
womb. Several doctors have admitted this to me in private, but you won’t hear it from the medical
institutions and lobby groups who have worked so hard to build smoking into Public Health
Enemy No 1.


A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of meeting with the late Dr Ken Denson, head
of the Thame Thrombosis and Haemostasis Research Centre in Oxfordshire, who was a rare and
inspiring objector to what he called the antismoking ‘witch hunt’. Dr Denson had devoted ten
years to researching smoking, and published several medical journal articles eloquently arguing
that the evidence, if looked at impartially and in total, was equivocal. He had unearthed countless
studies showing that changes in diet could offset any risks, that moderate smokers who exercised
had less disease than nonsmokers, and so on, and simply wanted to know why such studies were
ignored while anything appearing to show the slightest risk was trumpeted from the rooftops. In
Dr Denson’s view, doctors were failing smokers by preaching zero-tolerance instead of balance
and moderation. He also suggested that we talk about ‘smokers-related,’ rather than ‘smokingrelated’
diseases, since a majority of smokers have tended to have overall unhealthy lifestyles.


In Britain we’re now being told that the working class and poor have much more disease
than the middle class, and the main reason is smoking. But poorer and less-educated people are
more likely to get poor health care, have bad diets, drink too much, work too hard, exercise too
little, be more affected by stress and pollution, etc etc … all factors in ‘smoking-related’ disease
which are impossible to separate from smoking itself. You can always single out something as the
Curse of the Working Classes. In 1920s America it was booze; now it’s tobacco.