Also: cancer doesn’t cause you to die, having sex doesn’t cause you to get pregnant, and dropping matches in the woods does not cause forest fires.
You’re trying to fudge the argument but neither agreeing nor disagreeing, did you have a point?
cancer doesn’t cause you to die
Cancer that doesn’t go into remission will cause you to die.
having sex doesn’t cause you to get pregnant
I’ve had sex thousands of times without the woman becoming pregnant but
The likelihood of getting pregnanat without having sex is very small.
dropping matches in the woods does not cause forest fires
define “in the woods”. If I drop a match onto the muddy ground next to a stream in the middle of a forest, am I in the woods?
Not smoking does not prevent you from getting cancer
Smoking does not guarantee that you will get cancer
Cancer tumors have formed in the lungs of some animals exposed to high levels of cigarette smoke. Other known causative factors are air pollution, chemical fumes and coal dust.
Pope Urban VII had James beat by over a decade; in 1590 he instituted a public smoking ban in the Papal States.
Was the reason health or the foul smell of smoke, though? I know that various states (like Prussia) first had bans on tobacco after it was imported from the New World in 17th and 18th century, but my impression was that health risks were not the primary motivator at the start, because they needed some time to show up. (The Indians would probably not show the same cancer rate because they used tobacco for religious ceremonies, so less than just smoking x cigarettes a day).
My impression from historical texts of bans was that young foppish upper-class gentlemen started smoking, the smoke bothered the ladies and others, and it was another degenerate, lustful (and hence sinful) behaviour of said foppish degenerate lazy etc. young people (kids of today, only loafing about!), and that’s what motivated bans.
Plus there was no tax back then, so the state didn’t gain from smoking.
That’s like saying that unsafe sex never results in HIV infection because if it did everyone who engaged in unsafe sex would be infected. It’s faulty logic.
In the UK approximately 21% of the population are smokers yet 86% of lung cancer patients are smokers. That is very suggestive of a link between smoking and lung cancer.
From Cancer Research UK:
Shooting at someone doesn’t cause them to be hurt. It doesn’t even cause bullet wounds.
Well, we know that its contributory factor is “causing it.” (Technical term, bear with me.) We also know it’s a crapshoot statistically, like every cause of death – people have survived falling thousands of feet, but no one says “falling long distances does not even cause trauma.”
I’ve heard it said that the main reason some people do not get cancer from smoking is that they die from something else first – if they lived forever they would eventually develop cancer from smoking.