The Unconventional Wisdom : A Smoker's Lobby

"There is a new Marlboro land, not of lonesome cowboys, but of social-spirited urbanites, united against the perceived strictures of public health"
- Matthew Hilton, in his legendary book 'Smoking and Sociability'

This blog contains no heavy sounding words, no oxford-compliant grammer. :-) . Please compromise.

I have been willing to write something on this for a long time now. And truly speaking I have no clue how should I begin this. But one thing that I know for sure is, there is too much deception everywhere. There are too many theories all around us. Now I find most people ignorant, and that is a blunt understatement.Period. And why I say so, I will try a bit to justify, and if you dont get it, its ok, you are eligible to file your nomination for being the Union Health Minister of India next time. I would like to mention here that none of the data written henceforth is fictional, but is based on research papers and theories, some that were burried, forever.

I firmly believe in the concept of 'possibility'. Perhaps, the reason why I loved the Matrix Trilogy. Perhaps the reason why Quantum mechanics amuse me ( not that I get it, not that I am a scholar ).

Did we land on moon? Was 9/11 orchestrated by the US government? Had Mr. Roosevelt deciphered the Japenese 'purple code' long before Pearl Harbour happened? Was J.P. Morgan the greatest financier of all times, or one of the greatest conspirators in American history? Who killed Kurt Cobain? Is 'Global Warming' a conspiracy?

You see, there is so much chaos everywhere. So I chose to view and weigh all the options and possibilities and theories. And I dont want to be a worthless,brainless dog who believes in X just because the whole world is singing poems about it ( No offence, I see such people everywhere). Call me an arrogant bastard but now lets talk like adults, lets talk abt Y:

The common myth about smoking assert that the lungs of smokers become brown or black (hahaha) from years of accumulation of tar. CRAP!. Let me introduce you to this gentleman, Wray Kephart, working in a hospital, performing autopsies. Mr. Kephart has performed some 1560 autopsies till date, and he insists that it is normally impossible to tell, from autopsy, whether the deceased was or was not a smoker. Upon resection, the lungs are always clear, unless the deceased lived in a large city where there was significant industrial pollution. In that event, carbon deposits may be found, but these are unrelated to smoking. So the "brown lungs" myth is exactly that: a myth.

Don't believe Mr. Kephart? ( right, logical, since it can be a fabricated story as well! ). Fine, here is a medical fact :

"Its hard to tell if the deceased were a tobacco smoker or not by the appearance of the lungs. The absence of any black pigment suggests that the person was either a nonsmoker or a very light smoker. Heavy black pigmentation suggests that the person was either a heavy smoker, or lived in a city with heavy particulate air pollution, or was a coal miner, or some combination of the three. The black pigment in question is elemental carbon, which most investigators believe to be inert in its effects on the lungs"
-----Ed Uthman, A renowned Pathologist.

Soon after this satement in 1999, The US media, which almost completely is governed by the US government, made sure to eradicate this statement and study. Many such studies were lost in oblivion after this.

Now I dont blame you for a typical 3rd grade response from you- 'But I have seen pictures of smoker's lungs in dentists' clinics, in my text book in class 4th, and those photographs were just horrible and gross.'

Sirjee, please grow up. Those are phonies. The problem is simply that the photograph of the smoker's lung is a photograph of a lung ravaged by lung cancer; it is not a photograph of the lung of some smoker who died from some other disease. Which simply proves nothing except that the cancerous lungs look different from the non-cancerous lungs. HA!

There is another hilarious fact. The photographs show the outside surface of the lungs. The outside surfaces of lungs are not exposed to either air or smoke; therefore, it would be impossible for smoke to stain those surfaces. So next time you see such a photograph..smile nd light one of those little peacemakers and smoke out that magical stream off your nostrils right 'in the face'.

Another myth, propagated by the anti-smoking crowd, is the notion that lung cancer was a rare disease in US (because all these theories originate from the States) until some time in the 1930's, when it began to raise its ugly head as the result of smoking. The fact is that, the story being true proves nothing. Because in early part of the century, the diagnosis of lung cancer was complicated by "consumption factor". "consumption" refered to a group of inflictions characterised by emaciation,wasting away, coughing , which undoubtedly included tuberculosis along with other diseases. Unfortunately a rigid medical definition was not available, however many of the symptoms described were applicable to lung cancer and, in 1912, most people were treated by family physicians who made house calls, and probably diagnosed most diseases from the symptoms, rather than from any sort of laboratory analysis. The researchers concluded that there was a detection bias; that doctors were very ready to diagnose lung cancer in a smoker; very reluctant to make the diagnosis in a non-smoker.

Few more copy-paste facts :

In 1976, Dr. Doll R. and Dr. Peto R. issued a paper in which they reported that daily cigarette consumption by the British doctors who had been studied in connection with the 1964 SG's report had declined from 9.1 in 1951 to 3.6 in 1971. Doll and Peto claimed that, as a result there was a 38% reduction in lung cancer death rates amongst the doctors. In a paper27 , however, late Philip R. J. Burch, a professor of Medical Physics at the University of Leeds showed that Doll and Peto had compared the lung cancer death rates among the doctors with the lung cancer death rates for the entire British male population. Burch re-plotted the data to compare the doctors with themselves and showed that, on that basis, the risk for lung cancer amongst the doctors had actually increased by 31%.

BTW: Burch was a non-smoker, whose principal life work was an attempt to develop a unified theory of cancer.

In the same paper, Burch plotted cigarette consumption for women and men in England and Wales against lung cancer death rates, during the period 1890 to 1971. He showed that the largest increases in LCDR's in both sexes came during the time periods 1916- 1920 and 1931-35, when at a time when cigarette consumption among women in England and Wales was very small. From this Burch concluded that the rise in lung cancer was due to improved diagnosis, not smoking.

So now to sum up everything, this is Y :

In words of Lauren A. Colby,- 'actually the case for a smoking/lung cancer connection is by no means proven.Certainly, there is no case whatever for a connection between ETS (second hand smoke) and any disease, nor is there are any case for a connection between cigar and pipe smoking and lung cancer. The case for a connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer rests on the slim reed of a science called epidemiology. But all epidemiological studies, predicated as they are on statistics, are subject to so many co-factors and confounding factors as to be subject to innumerable different interpretations.'

If I have been taught to believe in Newton's Laws, and at the same time believe in Quantum mechanics, then its time to learn about the truth behind smoking ( specially since now our Mr. Ra-MAD-oss has shown his joblessness ).

Its too much to hope that this article will be completely read by non-smokers, but its a pity that even the educated individuals are so engrossed in the preceived notions of the society and so blinded by their prejudices that their rigid mental barriers are unshakable. I simply hope that my fellow smokers will read it and begin arming themselves with facts to refute the propaganda. A lot more to come in this blog, for all the smokers....

A friend asked me 'why do you smoke?'.

I answered 'I enjoy it'

I am afraid he just didnt "get it". :-).