I never addressed that question, but to my ears 2% sounds impossibly low. I certainly agree that smoking is bad for you.
My only point was that the stat thrown around quantifying how many people smoking kills each year is clearly inflated. The fact that the number of people smoking kills just happens to be (the number of people who die each year from all causes) * (the % of people who smoke) is pretty suspect.
What?!? Product placement in Hollywood films?!? No way!!! :eek:
FWIW, in Fleming’s works, Bond smokes a special Balkan–Turkish blend made to order by a company in London.
It works for me. Sounds like the problem is on your end.
No, the CDC has backed up it’s stats. Your “feeling” it cant be right is thus not backed by facts.
Those of us capable of simple arithmetic can easily see that the numbers are clearly inflated.
Did you read the Surgeon Generals report I linked to? It goes a bit beyond “simple arithmetic”.
Right, there are a ton of characters in movies or on TV shows who could plausibly be smokers or non-smokers. But there are certain characters who that if we spend a lot of time watching them and they are never seen smoking, it would seem a little odd. Jesse Pinkman is definitely a character who it would have been weird for him not to smoke, considering how big of a drug user he was, and then him being in and out of rehab.
There’s a big difference between the movie or TV makers digitally altering their show to have their correct creative vision shown, like it would be in this case, and censors going back to old shows and digitally altering them. I wouldn’t mind someone either adding in or taking out smoke or smoking in their own show, I would be bothered by censors going back and altering old shows.
Could you explain? Because the numbers don’t make sense to me either. Are they counting people twice? There are people who smoke who die from other things than from a smoking related disease. Smoking doesn’t make you impervious to accidents, suicide, or murder. I clicked on your link and looked at some of the stuff, but the report is split into 16 chapters, with a separate PDF for every chapter and I’m not going to click through and read all 877 pages. I googled for leading causes of death in the US, and found this page, which doesn’t break out what is or isn’t caused by smoking.
Just to clarify, I’m not a smoker, never been a smoker, think smoking is kinda gross and I would prefer not to be around it, and I’m okay with it being shown less often on TV and in movies. I just want to know what the real information is and understand it.
It’s deaths caused by smoking. Not smokers who die. The two numbers appear somewhat similar.
Which they shouldn’t be.
Let’s go about this from the other side. DrDeth, here’s a question for you:
2.5 million people die each year in the US. 18% of people smoke. Based on these two numbers, tell me, in your opinion, how many smokers die each year from all causes?
The Surgeon General has written an exhaustive study, completely backed by data, footnoted, etc. The Tobacco industry would LOVE to show it’s bogus, and has likely spend millions trying to disprove it. And, so you think that your skill in "simple arithmetic " has managed to disprove what dozens of experts wrote and dozens more worked to disprove.
sure.
Exactly. For a comparison, how many gun owners die every year? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Now, how many die * as a result of a gun-related accident* caused by personal ownership of a firearm (e.g. blows up in their hand, they accidentally shoot themself, etc.)? A few dozen? Maybe a hundred?
Lots of gun owners die in car crashes, from heart attacks or strokes, from being mauled by bears, etc., in similar proportions to non-gun owners. Owning a gun doesn’t make you significantly more likely to die as a result of these other causes.
I don’t see an answer to my question.
It’s not a rational question, thus no answer. You forget that ex-smokers also die of smoking related causes.
Nor have you read the Surgeon General report I linked to.
Uh-huh, sure.
Eric Flint has caused a little controversy by something similar. Flint’s a science fiction author and editor. He’s edited a series of collections of classic science fiction stories. And he goes through them and edits out references to characters smoking.
Some people argue that these stories are “classics” and they should republished in their original form. Flint and others have argued that times have changed and that while smoking used to be seen as a common and harmless activity, it’s now seen differently by modern readers. So having a character smoke would essentially change a character from what the author’s original intent had been. Flint argues he’s keeping the original intent intact by updating the text to modern usage.
I think Ellis Dee has raised a valid point. Not every smoker who dies died of a smoking-related cause. If a report is equating the two figures (smokers who died and people who died of a smoking-related cause) that’s a good reason to be suspicious.
Theoretically, it might be possible that the number of ex-smokers who died of a smoking-related cause is equal to the number of smokers who died of some other cause so the numbers could balance. But I find that an unlikely coincidence.
18% statistic, assuming it is accurate, is a count of what percentage of the population currently smokes, and as such is a snapshot in time. In a time of declining smoking, you would expect something that kills a large percentage of its users to perhaps be larger than the current %, because ex-smokers deaths and second hand smoke deaths are both considered to be “caused” by smoking. Plus smoking is probably more concentrated among the old, who die more than the young. Thus 18% of all adults in 2013 might be smokers, but of people who died in 2013 (or whatever year), the percentage who were active or ex-smokers is likely to be far higher than that. And that % is what you need to determine the statistic you seem to want, which is “what % of smokers does smoking kill ?”.
At any rate, I always thought that Ringo lighting up and then puffing and drumming through clouds of smoke in “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” at the beginning of Help! was completely gratuitous.
I find including everyone who ever smoked to be a disingenuous inflation of the numbers, but at least that could explain the numerical coincidence I’ve been citing. Like, for example, if 50% of all people smoke at some point in their lives, and 18% of deaths are caused by smoking, maybe I could see the logic there. That opens a can of worms, though. Imagine someone smoking through high school, quitting in college, then dying of heart disease fifty years later. Are we really asserting that smoking killed that person?
But anyway, googling around for more numbers, I see the World Health Organization says that “In 2012, an estimated 56 million people died worldwide.”
The World Heart Federation says that “Nearly 6 million people die from tobacco use or exposure to secondhand smoke, accounting for 6 per cent of female and 12 per cent of male deaths worldwide, every year.”
6 percent of female and 12 percent of male deaths are caused by smoking? How well does that match up to the CDC’s claim that 18% of deaths in the US are caused by smoking? Maybe they added 6% + 12% = 18% in a stupendous misunderstanding of how math works?
6,000,000 smoking deaths / 56,000,000 all deaths = 10.7% of all deaths are caused by smoking. Odd that smoking kills at nearly twice the rate in the US than in the world as a whole, isn’t it?
Later on in the WHF link I see that it states “Within 15 years, the risk of CVD becomes nearly the same as someone who has never smoked.” So when you’re factoring in ex-smokers, I guess you have to stop factoring them in after 15 years. Do you think it’s possible that the CDC is conveniently forgetting to do that, and that could be why their smoking death rates are double that of the world average?
What’s even more suspicious about the idea that the US’s smoking death rate is twice that of the world as a whole is that much of the linked WHF article talks about how much more of a problem smoking is in low-income countries. Also, China is mentioned as particularly bad for smoking. So you would expect that low-income countries + China would be above the 10% line, while Europe and North America would be lower than 10%. Yet the CDC asserts that the smoking death rate in the US is a staggering 18%. Why is that, do you think?