Cecil, you need to do a little more research on deaths attributed to smoking! For one there is no where on a death certificate that list the cause as smoking only cancer is listed! As medical scientist have yet to determine what causes they are stretching the rules to make it appear that smoking is to blame.
Anyone that is a smoker and gets cancer is lumped into the heading of tobacco usage without regard as to what type of cancer caused the death.
There are other factors that come into play such as a family history of heart disease and body type, so if a person with a family history of heart disease, is obese and took up smoking at age 45 and died at age 50. His death would and is blamed on tobacco regardless of what the real cause was!
Wow. We’ve had conspiracy theorists about 9/11, the moon landing, JFK, racial differences, and the Illuminati, but this may be the first smoking =/= cancer one we’ve ever had. Being the first at anything is special.
In addition to actual cause of death, medical conditions directly leading to the cause of death and medical conditions indirectly contributing to the cause of death, current death certificates ask doctors specifically if tobacco use was (in their opinion) a contributing factor to death. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/blue_form.pdf
On the other hand, it is just an opinion. If the doctor is a rabid anti-smoking activist or simply ignorant of which cancers smoking enhances the odds of getting and which ones are statistically unaffected by it, then he’s as likely to answer that question incorrectly as some of the other posters here.
It’s true that no particular death can be called the effect of smoking. All that can be said is that a particular person who died from a given disease and who smoked probably died because of their smoking. Deaths from smoking are thus like not like deaths from automobile accidents, deaths from shooting, deaths from falls from a great height, etc.
Overall it is possible to estimate the number of deaths from smoking though. Many studies have been done showing that smokers die from many different diseases at a rate that’s considerably greater than nonsmokers from those diseases. Please note that this is many different diseases, not just lung cancer. Lung cancer isn’t even the majority of the extra deaths among smokers. Many kinds of cancer, many kinds of heart and lung problems, and many other diseases are indirectly caused by smoking.
What is done (or at least should be done) is the following: For each disease for which it has been shown that smokers are more likely to die than nonsmokers, the number of smokers who died in the given year from that disease is worked out. Then it’s calculated how many of them would have died if they were nonsmokers. The difference is the number of extra deaths caused by smoking. Then add up these numbers for all the diseases which cause extra deaths among smokers. This is the number of extra deaths among smokers that year.
If you’re saying that this isn’t satisfactory to you, well, tough. That’s the way it works for conditions like smoking that increase the number of deaths but don’t appear as the “cause of death” on death certificates. Being eaten by a shark may be a direct cause of death, but it’s very rare. Dying from the effects of smoking may be an indirect cause of death, but it’s very common.