...I am sure you are well aware of hte horror stories out there as well, with those getting cancer of the throat, eaten away by long term smoking (needing a plug like device in their throat),...

Who hasn't seen all that. The first problem is that those (Big Pharma & Big Med) promoting the "research" in support of such interpretation are raking in huge amounts of money (extorted from smokers in variety of ways) based on these interpretations.

The second and more fundamental problem is that the key claims of antismoking "science" still rest on mere statistical associations, more than half a century after they found these associations. Normal progression in science is to take such associations as a hint to be followed up shortly with hard science methods which can distinguish the causal from other types of associations.

The antismoking "science" is, half a century later, still stuck in the ""hint" phase! Any time they tried to get at the causes using hard science, the research backfired and smoking turned out to be protective against the very same diseases it was blamed for (e.g. smoking mice gets significantly fewer lung cancers than non-smoking mice, or in human randomized intervention trials, the randomly selected "quit group" gets more heart attacks & more lung cancers than those left to smoke, or similarly, among smokers, those who inhale tobacco smoke get fewer lung cancers than those who don't inhale,... etc, there are hundreds of such "anomalies"). It became so embarrassing, they simply stopped looking beyond the "hint" any more, and focues of using media to trumpet the hint as if they had a hard science proof underlying the claims.

To see what the problem with not moving beyond the mere statistical associations is, consider for example the fact that "wearing a bra" increases your "risk" for breast cancer by 12,500 times -- namely, if you take million test subjects who were bra and million who don't, you will find the breast cancer 12,500 more often in the "bra wearing" group than in the non-bra group. Does that mean bra causes breast cancer? Of course, not. This gigantic association (which dwarfs any association found regarding smoking and disease) merely reflects the fact that "bra" wearing is a "marker" for female gender, and women do get breast cancer 12,500 times more often than men.

Since tobacco smoke does have numerous medicinal effects (after all, tobacco was cultivated and revered for millennia as a medicinal and sacred plant for the healing properties of its smoke), it will associate with the very diseases for which it is therapeutic (or it may provide some relief against the causal agents of the diseases). For example, glutathione is the chief antioxidant and detox enzyme in our bodies, especially powerful for excreting mercury, lead, aluminum and other metals. A smoker will have nearly double levels of glutathione[/b] compared to non-smoker. Hence, if you are a person exposed to such metals at work or at home, you will find smoking to be helpful in alleviating the symptoms of the metal toxicity since your excretion rates will be double of those in non-smokers. Hence, smoking effectively halves your exposure level. Now, that doesn't mean it eliminates the exposure or its effects, but it does reduce it.

Therefore, a statistical sample which [b]does not control for the metals exposure level, but merely checks smoking vs diseases (caused by the toxic metal exposures), will find a statistical association, which will be generally positive i.e. those who smoke more will have more of these diseases, simply because smoking in this case is an indirect gauge, a marker or a measure, of the exposure level. But, if one controls for the exposure to metals, and compares the individuals with similar exposure, while varying only smoking parameter, then one will find smokers to have fewer of the same diseases.

In the glutathione example above, smoking will associate with these metal toxicity diseases exactly the same way that using sunscreens will associate with sunburns or skin cancers -- if you don't control for sun exposure, but pick samples within general population, you will find that users of sunscreens will have more sunburns and more skin cancers than non-users (since the latter may not spend much time in the sun, or may live in cloudy or rainy regions, thus do not need or use sunscreens). But, if you control for the sun exposure and compare people with the same levels of exposure, you will find that sunscreen users are protected against the very same problems that were positively associated with sunscreens within general population sample.

You can find much more on how the modern "health science" manipulates such statistical correlations (for profits of those funding the research) in a nicely written and very readable book (free, online):

Science Without Sense: The Risky Business of Public Health Research
by Steven J. Milloy

Though one cannot attribute it all to smoking, there is ample evidence it has devastated families.

The only thing that "devastates families" of smokers is the financial and social damage from the antismoking con artists. There is also a negative placebo or a witch doctor effect, which does actually damage the health of those smokers who believe in the antismoking voodoo:

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J. Hatton, R. Harris [/i] Murder a Cigarette: the Smoking Debate[/b]

<img src="http://www.forces.org/writers/hatton/images/book1.jpg">

There was a study in Heidelberg, described by Professor Eysenck in Psychological Reports (1989) in which 528 men were asked [b]whether they, as smokers, were convinced that they would be very likely to develop lung cancer, heart disease, or other 'smoking related diseases'.

The 72 who answered 'yes', while admitting that their views were taken from information in the media, had an almost three times higher death rate at the end of 13 years than those who were not so influenced.

Fear can kill. This has been known since disease was first studied. We are entitled to wonder how many people have been killed more by the fear of 'smoking related diseases' than by any actual disease itself.


[i]Leslie Kenton Modern-day Death Curses

<img src="http://www.lesliekenton.com/activebar/images/leslie1.jpg">

Almost everybody has heard of death curses: psychological literature is laced with accounts of how Aboriginal witch doctors have quite literally brought about the death of the young and healthy by cursing them. No sooner do these people learn of the fate which has been cast for them than they begin inexplicably to sicken and eventually to die. It appears that through complex biological processes, their simple belief in the curse brings about destruction of their organism.

In civilized society we tend to look upon such phenomena as anthropological curiosities - products of primitive superstition which simply don't touch us in our more enlightened age. What we are not aware of however is that many of us in the civilized world are also under our own brand of `death curses'. They may be subtler than those issued by witch doctors but they can be every bit as potent in bringing about the physical and mental decline which we have come to associate with aging.

Common (and usually unconscious) notions such as `retirement', `middle-age', `It's all down hill after forty', and `At your age you must start taking things more easily', are widely held. They can exert a powerful effect on the process of aging by creating destructive self-fulfilling expectations about age decline. Instead of facing the future full of confidence and excitement about what lies ahead, optimism is replaced by anxiety as we are warned to `Be careful', or `Don't take chances on a new career at your age.'
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I am still trying to improve from my last smoking bout nearly 4 months ago.

Sorry to hear about the problems you had. It may well be that you are harmed chiefly by the above "witch doctor effect" since you seem to believe very strongly in the antismoking propaganda, being wired, as most people are, in the antismoking propaganda "matrix". It could be also that you have smoked additive laden junk cigarettes and the additives, not the tobacco smoke proper, has caused a bad reaction. It may also be that you smoked too many cigarettes too quickly, after a long period of not smoking (there can always be too much of a good stuff). WIthout further experimentation, you won't know which is the case.

If I were you, I would take a clean, additive free organically grown tobacco (such as Natural American Spirit), pick a thin cigarette paper, without filters and hand roll one, then smoke it as health ritual, in peace and quiet, observe the blue smoke cloud and kind of try to connect spiritually with the magic contained in this ancient gift of gods. This is quite different process than a hectic, hurried and mechanical sucking of supermarket junk cigarettes. The latter is not very different than gorging on few pounds of MSG laden potato chips in one sitting -- it's going to make you sick, even though a real potato in real home made dish from traditional recipe may be perfectly fine and healthy for you.

If you can't find NAS tobacco pouches or cans in your area, the full flavor, regular Winston cigarettes do use real tobacco leaf and are additive free (albeit they don't use organically grown tobacco, but that may be a minor aspect dwarfed by the positive medicinal effects of the leaf). In that case you would need to snip off the filters (since they change the balance of CO vs medicinal smoke particles and also shed non-biodegradable fibers which you end up inhaling) and perhaps use a cigarette holder, to cool the smoke and avoid burning your lips, if you are not used to these oldfashioned ways of smoking. The principal point, though, is to smoke it as a sacred health ritual, like taking some ancient miracle herb or tea, or some latest highly recommended supplement.

<img src="http://members.iglou.com/perkins/newkpf/2002_07/1198.jpg">

In conclusion, tobacco is the single most potent natural medicine that humans have ever had. No other medicine, natural or synthetic, comes even close to the broad spectrum and depth of its healing magic.