Smoking.. another side to the story.

blogs about smoking seem to be popular these days.
So let me add one to that...

We all know how gouverments and the media tries to convince us all about how bad smoking is for our health. And from looking at the comments on these blogs .. We see they are suceeding very well at that.

They reach their conclusions by studies... What is such a study really? For easy calculation lets use easy numbers.. they select "randomly" 2000 people.. 1000 smokers, 1000 non-smokers. Then they look how many of those people get lungcancer for example. Other factors are ignored since this study only focusses on the relation between smoking and lungcancer in this case. If it shows that the smokers have more cases of lungcancer the study will conclude a connection between these 2.
Ofcourse the amount of peope involved in this study is far higher and the conclusion won't be based upon just 1 study.

A key part in such studies is the people they select... how do they select? In many cases they just use existing lists. Anything can be a list... for example.. how about we use the memberlist of cs to do a study about marriages and devorces. I am very sure the results would say happy marriages don't happen according to such a study, and 100% of marriages ends up in devorce. Unless some married people are member of cs.

We can extend our group of people and select everyone that uses blogs and forums on daily basis all over the internet. Would this be a better selection?
Not really because it is very likely that married people who have a family don't have the time (or need) to be active online everyday.

Now back to the smoking.. I've read studies that concluded 2nd hand smoke is more lethal then actual smoking. How does one reach such conclusion? Everyone is 2nd hand smoker... and the toxics in cigarettes would do more damage in mild consumption then in direct contact? Kinda strange if you ask me.

The amount of people that smoke in my country has been declining the last 10 years. The amount of people who have died from lungcancer and other smoking related diseases have gone up. Doesn't make much sense to me if smoking really is the cause of these diseases.

Their are studies available online that show smokers are less likely to develop alzheimer, parkinson and other serious diseases. These studies don't reach the general public because media for some reason ignore them. but feel free to look it up.. I'm sure google will have them for you.

Now don't reach wrong conclusions about my opinion about smoking. I'm not saying smoking is good for your health. But like with all things in life, it won't damage you if you don't overdo it. A glass of red wine a day would be good for your blood or something.. drinking 3 bottles a day will damage you.
Drinking water is considered very healthy... but drink to much water and it can kill you.

I can understand gouverments who want to blame all this on the smokers. We are an easy target and very vissible. Attacking us is far easier then exposing the real problems because then they would be held responsable for dealing with it.
Dealing with it would involve drastic changes in our current economy, our current way of industry and transportation. The entire organisation our society is build on would need to be reinvented, and that simply can't be done. So they need smokers to get away with it.