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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

And wood smoke is more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke.

So what? I don't want to live in a world without bacon, sausages, roast beef, pipes and cigars!

The fundamental fallacy is the idea that tobacco is so dangerous that it, and anything comparably dangerous, must be banned. Tobacco's dangerous. Cigarettes are a really bad idea. Eating meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner is a pretty bad idea. Don't do that so much.

But you, I and everyone else on earth will die sometime, of something: whether it's cancer, congestive heart failure or something else entirely, we all die. The question is, will we live before we die?

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> The fundamental fallacy is the idea that tobacco is so dangerous that it, and anything comparably dangerous, must be banned.

Please name a country where selling or buying cigarettes is not legal.

> But you, I and everyone else on earth will die sometime, of something: whether it's cancer, congestive heart failure or something else entirely, we all die.

Strawman. By that logic we would not use safety belts or cars.

>Please name a country where selling or buying cigarettes is not legal.

There ya go[1]. It would have taken you 5 seconds to google this. The Country is Bhutan.

https://www.google.com/search?q=country+cigarettes+illegal&o...

> Strawman. By that logic we would not use safety belts or cars.

No, it's really not. Are you trying to say that we won't all die at some point?

That's also the argument a lot of people give for having dangerous hobbies, so it's not a strawman in the least.

Really, we shouldn't use cars nearly so much as we do. But if we must, then the very modest inconvenience of having to wear a seatbelt is well worth the improvement in outcome should a crash occur.

That said, there's still plenty of controversy about all the laws around graduated carseats for children—that the carseat industry seems much more interested in emotional appeals than hard data is an obvious red flag.

I always thought that raw tobacco while not good for you, is not nearly as bad as cigarettes. It's all the other crap cigarette companies put in there that really makes it bad for you.

So if you're going to smoke, make sure it's cuban cigars all the way ;)

That and you don't inhale cigar/pipe tobacco plus for whatever reason they don't appear to be addictive in the same way cigarettes are. In an ideal world I wish all tobacco wasn't lumped together with cigarettes because while I'm sure smoking a pipe/cigar has its risks my impression is those risks are no where as bad as with cigarettes. Unfortunately I've never been able to find any real studies on cigars/pipes in isolation.

Less lung cancer, more mouth and esophogeal cancer. You have to adjust for the fact that people who smoke pipes and cigars smoke much less overall, and then also for the fact that cigarettes almost always have filters.

It's not hard to find studies with good data; e.g., http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/4/333.full. Note that the NIH refuses to answer this question (viz. http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/to...) because they have an absolutist agenda that's not served by talking about differential risks. But the data's out there and you can readily determine the specific risks for yourself. Whether you think it's "much better" than cigarettes is up to you. The data's pretty compelling, though; I wouldn't smoke anything on a regular or frequent basis.

Thanks for the link.

> The data's pretty compelling, though; I wouldn't smoke anything on a regular or frequent basis.

And I feel like this is the key for many of the these health issues. Habitual <insert bad thing here> is really the problem.

I wouldn't advocate for abstinence over education, and I usually feel like our understanding of human health and nutrition is comparable in sophistication to alchemy; but to add some nuance to the counterargument to what you said, I'll suggest that whether we will live before we die is only one of the important questions, that (a) how long we'll live, and (b) the total number of happy, easy, healthy years we'll have before we die, are also important questions. Until the science is more reliable, moderation seems like the safe bet.

Regarding that part of "everyone else on earth will die sometime, of something", is there an ideal death graph that we aim to? I mean, do we know were are we trying to go?.

Just a curiosity, but it will be interesting if somebody is modeling such an "ideal death statistics" (like 0 car accidents, 0 cancer, 0 murders, 80% age related heart failure, etc...).

Ideal to whom? The state may or may not have its own paternalistic notions about how people ought to die, but so does each individual. Your ideal death is the one you'd prefer; mine is the one I'd prefer.

Side note, ever seen anyone dying of heart failure? Not a way I'd want to go.

"The fundamental fallacy is the idea that tobacco is so dangerous that it, and anything comparably dangerous, must be banned."

And yet they never seem to apply this idea to "governments with too much power", despite said institutions being responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths.

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