Zachary Kern6 said:Someone smoking a pack a day essentially faces a twenty times higher risk of developing lung cancer compared to a non-smoker. If you consider that over 80%, and quite likely even over 90%, of all lung cancer cases are directly linked to smoking—especially when you factor in other variables that don't just add up with smoking but actually amplify the danger, like genetics—I suppose one would have to be truly irrational to keep going with it. Even if this specific statistic is accurate (that 17% of smokers eventually succumb to lung cancer), which I suspect it is, the numbers are honestly quite devastating because that is such a massive percentage. It’s a bit like standing at an airport where there are six planes waiting to board, and you know for a fact that one of them has a bomb on it that will detonate mid-flight... I can't imagine who would actually gamble on that by boarding, hoping they just happen to pick one of the other five. The math seems pretty clear: if 90% of lung cancer deaths are attributed to smokers, that’s a fairly easy figure to track, leaving that remaining 10% to things like genetics, environmental pollution, or secondhand smoke. People tend to lean on anecdotal "evidence," like saying, "Well, my grandfather smoked for eighty years and died in a car accident," or "My mother never touched a cigarette and still got lung cancer." Sure, those outliers exist, but they really are the exception rather than the rule. Smoking has arguably been the single greatest scourge of the last century. In fact, I believe a prominent surgeon named Adler wrote a chapter on lung cancer in his 1908 surgical textbook where he actually questioned whether it was even worth mentioning such a "rare disease."
Allen Carr 🙂
