Is there a difference in the lungs of someone that dies of lung cancer as opposed to someone that dies because of second hand smoke?
What do you mean by “dies because of second hand smoke”? Do you mean the type of lung cancer you might get from exposure to second hand smoke?
I don’t think people die just from “second hand smoke”. They die because the second hand smoke caused some medical problem (e.g. lung cancer, COPD, severe butt rot, etc.) that killed them.
The most common cause of second hand smoke death is smoke inhalation. Unless you started the housefire yourself, it’s second-hand. 
To use a quote my father sometimes had, the folks who died of either of these conditions expired from “acute lack of breathing.”
~VOW
My point is that “second hand smoke” is not itself a cause of death, in the same way that “a 45 caliber bullet”, “a 100 ft cliff”, and “a 1995 Ford F150 Pickup” are not causes of death. They are instrumentalities that, based upon how exactly a person is exposed to them, can produce a medical condition such as “blunt force trauma” or “severe blood loss” that actually can be a cause of death.
The OP seems to have confused an instrumentality (second hand smoke) with a medical condition (lung cancer).
Reminds me of a story about an ME who, as the legend goes, would always write down “cardiac arrest” as the cause of death and elaborate somewhere else in the file. He wasn’t wrong, but…
I recently heard that the Medical Examiner in my state (Illinois) doesn’t accept “cardiac arrest” as a cause of death. It’s important for physicians to fill out death certificates with the actual cause of death because they are used for compiling demographics and public health databases. Of course, they want the proximal cause, so COPD or lung cancer rather than 2nd hand smoke.
Yes, everyone’s heart stops beating when they die.
If the OP’s question relates to whether lung cancer looks different microscopically when it is caused by smoking as opposed to being caused by secondhand smoke inhalation, the answer appears to be no (there are different distributions of lung cancer types in non-smokers compared to smokers, but I haven’t heard that secondhand tobacco smoke (thought to cause 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in the U.S.) results in different tumor types than what’s seen in smokers).
Of course, it is not possible to directly say that smoking caused someone’s lung cancer or that secondhand smoke inhalation caused someone’s lung cancer, just that there are known associations between lung cancer and these risk factors.
Noted in passing: I diagnosed yet another case of lung cancer today in a smoker (squamous cell carcinoma). The beat goes on.
Apart from the cancer, would a smoker’s lung look different from a lung of someone who got cancer from second-hand smoke? Would the smoker’s lung be more discolored, or damaged in other ways besides cancer?
Regards,
Shodan
Are we comparing smokers and non smokers who were exposed to smoke from similar geographical locations?
Urban dwellers, for example tend to have “dirtier” lungs at autopsy than rural dwellers due to air pollution.
Very few people in the developed world have totally pink lungs- even non smokers.
Adenocarcinoma is one of the lung cancers less associated with smoking, so a higher percentage of people with adenocarinoma than SCLC will be non smokers, but nonetheless, tobacco exposure raises your risk of lung cancer full stop.
Perhaps the OP could clarify exactly what they’re asking?
A definite maybe. As noted, this depends on other factors (like if you live in a polluted environment); besides there’s no precise dose-response relationship in development of cancer due to carcinogens. A person could, due to an accident of timing or genetic susceptibility develop lung cancer after limited exposure (as a smoker or secondhand inhaler) and their lungs could look pretty normal (except for the cancer). There are smokers with terrible-looking lungs (emphysematous, inflamed etc.) and diminished pulmonary function but no cancer. There are long-term smokers whose lungs don’t look all that terrible and function OK.
Thanks for your responses.
Regards,
Shodan
Although not totally specific to non-smokers, lung cancers in that group have a higher prevalence of mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor than in smokers and likewise tend to respond to treatment with EGFR inhibitors, also unlike those in smokers.