The WHO’s anti-smoking lies (a thread)

In this thread I will be discussing the main studies cited by Western governments and the WHO in support of their smoking campaigns and explaining why they are erroneous or misleading.

For context, tobacco spread to Europe in the 16th Century, first arriving in France in 1556.

One of the first anti-smokers in history was King James I of England, who published the treatise below and used it as basis for implementing high taxes on the product.

There wasn’t any hard evidence that smoking was unhealthy until around 1951 when Richard Doll (key figure in the Socialist Medical Association) and Bradford Hill published a study linking tobacco usage to lung cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Notorious statistician Ronald Fisher opposed the study, pointing out that the subjects who inhaled the cigarette smoke were less likely to develop tumors than those who didn’t, nullifying the relationship between cigarette smoke and lung cancer.

(Fisher was pretty based by the way, you guys should probably look into him)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher

Another anomaly present in the study was that the group of non-smokers turned out to be more vulnerable to other types of cancer (besides lung) than smokers. This was largely ignored.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Doll and Hill study didn’t survey at random, it targeted only smokers and ex-smokers, without questioning why those who quit did so. In light of all of these problems, a new study was conducted: the Whitehall study.

The first Whitehall study

This study divided about 14000 British civil servants who were smokers into two categories, a control group and a test group counselled to quit smoking.

Long story short: the quit group didn’t show significant improvement in life expectancy or death rates associated with heart disease or lung cancer, yet the rates for other cancers still turned out slightly higher for the non-smokers.

The Whitehall study was praised by international authorities such as the American Surgeon General (which would go on to reject the study by the 90s due to its “small sample size” in favor of larger uncontrolled and non-randomized surveys).

The Quantification of Drug Caused Mortality and Morbidity in Australia

This was a study was published by the Australian Federal Department of Community Services and Health in 1988. This study used the results of a 1954 study by E. C. Hammond...

...which was another large-scale uncontrolled and non-randomized survey-based study (which are notoriously difficult to conduct accurately). Hammond would later admit his study’s results were erroneous.

Nevertheless, the study was used by the Australian Health Department advertising that hundreds of people would die from smoking yearly and that lung cancer would overtake breast cancer as the deadliest malignant cancer in women in a few years (it still hasn't).

Dissident studies

In 1996, a 6-month bioassay titled “Failure of cigarette smoke to induce or promote lung cancer in the A/J mouse” was released by the Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute of New Mexico. Pretty self-explanatory.

In 2003, a study titled “Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98” was published by J. E. Enstrom of the University of California, which concluded...

...there is no causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, stating that “The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.”

There is a 1975 paper titled "A Critical Reassessment of the Evidence Bearing on Smoking as the Cause of Lung Cancer" published by T. D. Sterling, PhD. (from which I got some of the screenshots in this thread). This is a pretty short paper but has a ton of cool data.

Conclusion

The evidence cited by governments and the WHO in support of anti-smoking campaigns is dubious and largely skewed. I’m not of the opinion that smoking is healthy, but that its effects are largely exaggerated in favor of anti-smoking narratives.

What do they gain from this?

Knowing how the UN and Western governments operate, it shouldn’t surprise you that they’re willing to skew data in order to frighten the population into supporting more laws and taxes.

(This is precisely what we’re seeing nowadays with climate change and gun control lol)

Taxing tobacco has turned out to be really profitable for the State, that’s why I mentioned King James I in the beginning of this thread. Demonizing tobacco also enables pharmaceutical monopolies to profit off of smoking cessation medications (and we all know who's behind that).

That being said, tobacco and nicotine are still addictive substances, as is alcohol, so refraining from consuming them (or doing so moderately) is probably still advisable.

The point of this thread is to showcase how potentially biased scientific research can be, as well as how the system uses it in its favor.

Thanks if you made it this far c:

. @NoMoreStatism questioned me about this so I'll make an addendum here:

None of the studies cited in this thread are related to or financed by tobacco companies (AFAIK). I decided not to include those as they're equally dubious and misleading.

Corrections:

On the first tweet it's supposed to say "anti-smoking campaigns" instead of "smoking campaigns" (lol)

and on the "The Quantification of Drug Caused Mortality and Morbidity in Australia" tweet it's supposed to say "This was a study published..." I said "was" twice.