It's not absurd once you account for the already present carcinogens from burned plant material. And even smokeless tobacco (chewing etc) causes oral, oesophagus, and pancreas cancer.
What is in national brand cigarettes is not tobacco, but a product made from tobacco that is almost entirely unlike tobacco. Tobacco is put in a vat, the nicotine is extracted, a mash is made into which nicotine is infused at higher levels than in natural tobacco, and 300+ known carcinogens are added called additives, from the mash a paper is made, the paper is sliced into little pieces, this is mixed with cut stems, whatever fell on the floor, and previous recycled product that was never sold, all stuffed into paper.
Natural tobacco, on the other hand, is grown, dried, and sold. Sometimes water is added.
Your claim is both products are equally lethal. If smoking pipe tobacco (which as I have always seen it sold, is natural tobacco, easy to tell by looking at it) is just as bad as smoking cigarettes, then adding 300+ carcinogens to cigarettes has no ill effects. This is what is absurd, because, of course adding 300+ carcinogens is going to make the product more lethal. The 300+ carcinogens is the reason why 400K Americans die every year do to smoking-related illness. Prior to the 1950's chemical revolution, the mortality rate of smokers did not even begin to approach this number. Beginning in the 1950's is when smokers started dying en mass every year.
There is a massive difference between natural tobacco and what is in cigarettes. The latter is lethal, the sole cause of the high mortality rates of smokers. The former is merely unhealthy. Pipe smokers that inhale live as long as non-smokers, and pipe smokers that do not inhale live longer than non-smokers. That's what the US Surgeon General report says.
Am I getting through?
My grandparents smoked, presumably for 50 years before they passed in their mid-70's. They could have lived past 100, because my grandmother's sister lived to 103. But she also smoked for 80 years. My mother points out that unlike my grandparents, my great aunt was an avid walker, walked a few miles every day religiously. So she makes a fair point, because inactivity and sedentary lifestyles also are cut short. My mother's sister smoked intermittently, but ultimately had quit for 10 years before dying relatively young (58) from breast cancer. My aunt made the observation that cigarettes stink, but insisted that they did not used to stink, claiming that when she was young her parents smoked in the car with her and her siblings, and it never occurred to her to open a window, because the second hand smoke back then was not irritating in the least. Her brother, my uncle, smoked cigars, basically chain smoked them, died at 67. My mother smoked, but quit for decades, then started again and smoked for another 15 years before quitting again only a year ago. She's 79. Then there's George Burns, who started smoking when he was 14 years old and lived to 100 after smoking an estimated 300,000 cigars. See Ecc. 9:11.
Very sorry to hear about your uncle. How old was your uncle when he passed? What did he do for a living? Was he a veteran? How much did he weigh? Is there any history of cancer in the family?
> I only know people died from lung and other cancers or copd on a massive scale long before anything was added to tobacco.
If you could share any reference links to any study performed before the 1950's, then we could all know this.
