WW2 smoking deaths

Comments on Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
#1

Today’s classic archive article, http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_097.html , ended with the note that as many as an “order of magnitude” (10 times) more World War II veterans have died as a result of smoking-related illnesses than died in battle.

While this is probably true, the letter Cecil was answering seemed to be asking a narrower, and even harder-to-answer, question. Namely: Because of the practice of distributing cigarettes to American G.I.s, how many WW2 veterans died from smoking that WOULD NOT HAVE DIED had cigarettes not been so distributed?

This tougher question would require knowing how many G.I.s started to smoke while in service, as well as how many G.I.s who were already smokers would have quit smoking if not for those freely available cigarettes.

I’m not flying fast, just orbiting low.

#2

[[This tougher question would require knowing how many G.I.s started to smoke while in service, as well as how many G.I.s who were already smokers would have quit smoking if not for those freely available cigarettes.]]

I’d say that data would be impossible to get and almost impossible to even guess. Tobacco use was heavily marketed in those days to everyone. Brands were touted as being “recommended by 5 out of 6 doctors” and that kind of thing, too.

#3

Tough indeed, tracer. And probably moot. True, the gummint passed out the coffin nails like candy to GI’s, but they did nearly the same for civilians, when you allow for subsidies and privileges handed out to the tobacco lobby.

So while the government may have killed a lot of soldiers, I don’t think it was all that many more than they killed back home. But again, it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to scrounge up any numbers one way or t’other.

-andros-

There’s always a bigger fish.

#4

andros wrote:

Weelllll … I wouldn’t go so far as to say that subsidies and privileges handed out to tobacco companies qualify as “passing out cigarettes to civilians.” The civilians still had to buy the things – and there was (and still is) a tobacco excise tax.

#5

You’re right. I was hyperbolizing.

Still and all . . . is the government’s distribution of cigs to GI’s any worse than using tax money to subsidize tobacco farmers?

Sorry if that’s wandering off topic.

-andros-

There’s always a bigger fish.