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Originally Posted by clarie
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One in two long-term smokers will die prematurely as a result of smoking †“ half of these in middle age. The most recent estimates show that around 114,000 people in the UK are killed by smoking every year, accounting for one fifth of all UK deaths.
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http://www.ash.org.uk/html/factsheets/html/fact02.html
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25,000 people die in the UK each year from alcohol-related illnesses - this is 50 times the annual rate of death from all illicit drugs put together!
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http://www.recovery.org.uk/druginfo/index.html |
The problem with statistics is that they only show what the publisher wants them to show.
There is a difference between 114,000 people in the UK are killed by smoking each year and 114,000 smokers die in the UK each year. They may die of illnesses that could have been a result of them smoking or the same illness could have been caused by many other factors. They are automatically put in the "death caused by smoking" group simply because they are smokers. They could just as well have died from the same illness if they had never smoked a cigarette in their life or been anywhere where they encounted passive smoke.
Deaths from passive smoking are even harder to be correctly diagnosed. They die prematurely from an illness that could have been smoking related but could just as easily be nothing to do with smoking. A non-smoking barman dies from lung cancer so it must be because of the effects of passive smoking. Why must it?