The benefits of smoking

Today I ran across an interesting article about smoking that you can read here: Could Tabacco Be Good for You?. In the article the author talks about how there are some confirmed benefits to smoking. If you read the article, the whole tone is much more like an adolescent, which I would say is in stark contrast to articles that display wisdom. In my experience wisdom tends to be both calm and slightly amused.

Tone aside, I do think that the author makes some good points. Smoking does in fact have some positive side affects. Personally I've suspected that smoking is much like drinking. It can be done responsibly, and in proper proportions may even be beneficial. And from what I've heard about people quitting, it also seems the same. Some people don't find at at all difficult, and for others its nearly impossible. If this is the case, then smoking is no different than any other kind of consumption, with the possible exception that it really does smell bad. But on the other hand drunks aren't exactly easy on the nose either.

The single most valuable thing that I learned in my intro to statistics class is that correlation does not equal causation. When people say that smoking causes cancer, they are incorrect. Smoking correlates to cancer, we do not know what causes cancer. Radiation is a pretty safe bet, but that's about it.

To demonstrate the point, in the early 19 hundreds, there were a number of cases in rich families where newborns developed scurvy. The reason was that rich mothers could afford to feed their kids processed milk, which lacked vitamin C. So at the time, before they knew that scurvy was a vitamin C deficiency disease, one may have concluded that processed milk caused scurvy in newborns. But the truth is that you could give them processed milk till you were blue in the face and they would never develop scurvy as long as you gave them some vitamin C as well.