Sunday, May 08, 2005

Smoke Cigarettes - Live Longer

Yeah I know. That is not what you have been told. Yet it looks like it is true. I was reading Number Watch a page devoted to debunking bad statistics and bad numbers. I was looking at the April issue and came across this interesting piece about tobacco smokers. They live longer.

The 400,000-deaths figure is not a body count, but a COMPUTER-GENERATED estimate based on assumptions that are heavily biased by a political agenda of lies and loot. In different times, the people perpetrating this fraud, and their promoters, would have been arrested and charged on many counts. But not today, when these criminals are protected at the highest political level.

More and more evidence emerges every day against the frauds of the anti-tobacco cartel. Read this powerful analysis. Download it. Distribute it to as many people as you can. People must know the truth. Consider it your duty as a citizen. People must know that there is a criminal endeavor designed to instigate persecution in society in order to extort billions of dollars from smokers, who are already carrying a greater fiscal burden than non-smokers are.
So where did all those deaths come from? They came from the definition. According to the way the study was done if you died from a tobacco related cause your death was premature. I'm sure such a definition didn't bias the result. So what is actually happening?
* THE SMOKING "VICTIMS" LIVED LONGER THAN THE REST OF US, BY ABOUT 2 YEARS - 71.9 vs. 70.

* OVER 70,000, or about 17%, DIED "PREMATURELY" AT AGES GREATER THAN 85.

* ONLY 1900, OR FEWER THAN O.5 % OF THE SMOKING "VICTIMS" DIED AT AGES LESS THAN 35, WHILE 143.000, OR 8% OF THE REST OF US DIED AT AGES LESS THAN 35.
Oooops. I hope the centers for disease control do not ge a hold of this. There is more on this subject here.

BTW tobacco is an anti-depressant. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

3 comments:

jj mollo said...

I don't know. The doctors aren't wrong about this, and there've been a lot of studies for specific diseases. Nevertheless, if you look at average life span, maybe the numbers could be reversed for one simple reason. People who are not well to begin with will not take up smoking. Only healthy people can afford such a habit. If you were to do a paired study, where people matched for initial health were randomly assigned to smoke or not smoke, I'm sure you would identify a problem with smoking pretty quickly. Since such a study would be unethical, we can never know with certainty the effect of smoking.

This certainly doesn't mean that I don't agree with your basic idea that prohibition is a bad thing and people deserve the freedom to pick their own poison.

jj mollo said...

P.S. I'm always a little leary of counter-intuitive articles published in April.

M. Simon said...

jj,

You are quite right about the correlation of cigarette smoking with cancer. It also has some effect on those with heart problems.

However we do know that stress relief helps people live longer. Depression shortens peoples lives.

So it may be that the anti-depressant effects of cigarettes more than compensates for the increased mortality from other causes.

BTW did you look at the source articles which go into more detail about the statistics and how they were derrived?

Correlation is not causation. So you may be correct about self selection bias. However, the Electrical Engineer who looked at the anti-smoking statistics says that the anti folks cooked the books.