There’s been a series of cigarette commercials recently ending with the same tagline: Tobacco kills 1 in 5 Americans. Last I checked, 19% of Americans smoked. Assuming this was creative rounding, in countries where 40-50% of people smoke (We’re looking at you, China,) tobacco should kill 1 out of 2 or 1 out of 3 people.
I’m going to call bullshit on this. What’s the real number? Also, how can they get away with lying like this?
20 years ago there were a lot more people smoking, and those people are still dying off due to cigarette-related illnesses.
Attributing a death to tobacco use can be easy or difficult. Lung cancer and emphysema deaths among people who smoked for a signicant numbers of years can be pretty safely attributed. Heart disease and other types of cancer are less clear cut.
Here are CDC numbers from 2010, out of a total of 2,468,435 deaths.
•Heart disease: 597,689
•Cancer: 574,743
•Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 138,080
•Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 129,476
•Accidents (unintentional injuries): 120,859
•Alzheimer’s disease: 83,494
•Diabetes: 69,071
•Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,476
•Influenza and Pneumonia: 50,097
•Intentional self-harm (suicide): 38,364
If 1 in 5 Americans smokes, they are going to die: therefore all smokers die; had they not smoked they might never die — this is neither provable nor unprovable since there is no knowing what would happen if they were in the state of being never-smokers — and it can be postulated that since there is only one constant, them all being smokers, the cause of death is always smoking.
Actually I think they didn’t count smoking only but exposure to smoke, which is pretty much everybody.
Just to inject a few basic facts: Up to one half of all regular smokers can be expected to die from a tobacco-related illness. The most important causes of smoking-related mortality are atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Linkage of smoking to profoundly increased risk of these diseases is quite clear.
About 40% of the US adult population is a current or past regular smoker.
The timing of the final second of your death depends on millions of variables undertaken during your lifetime. Every single one of them “caused your death” at that particular moment. If a person who smoked would have lived one more decade, or one more year, or month, or day , or hour, or second if he had not smoked, is it smoking that caused his death? And nothing else?
Smoking kills us all, 5 out of 5, and so, in its own unique way, does everything else we encounter in our lives.
There are also tobacco users who don’t smoke. Chewing tobacco kills people, too.
Through various lawsuits, some state and local governments have forced tobacco companies to help fund various anti-tobacco non-profit groups and well as to promote quitting smoking.
These groups then use the money to fund more quitting smoking/anti-tobacco advertising. The irony is that these groups are using the same tactics (race targeting, youth/age targeting, and twisting facts/figures to support their side) that tobacco companies got themselves in trouble over.
They get away with it because, who’s going to complain? The tobacco companies?
Here’s the actual fact sheet from the CDC:
There are well known statistical methods which account for this. It is not always possible to point to a person and say smoking killed her (though it definitely killed my aunt) but over the entire population you can compute additional deaths due to smoking. (Which shorten life, the whole point.)
And if someone quits smoking today, he leaves the 19% - but that doesn’t mean that smoking can’t kill him. The claim sounds reasonably plausible to me.
And there are people like me who smoke but have never used tobacco. Increasingly there is a need for precision in our discussions.
Nevermind.