General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Just ban cigarettes already. Please. [View all]Saving Hawaii
(441 posts)They just cause a significantly higher risk for those things.
Cigarette smoking isn't guaranteed to kill you. You may die of other things. You may be relatively healthy and just die of old age. But you're significantly upping your risk for lung cancer, COPD, and a variety of other disease processes that can kill you. You may get lung cancer that isn't even due to cigarette smoking... if you'd never touched a smoke in your life, you could still get lung cancer.
It's pretty misleading, I think, to suggest that cigarette smoking doesn't cause lung cancer because you're not guaranteed to get lung cancer (sorry Kurt Vonnegut) and you might get lung cancer even if you never smoke. It drastically increases the risk for that; hence it causes it. People can quibble over definitions of words like "cause", but I think it's pretty misleading if your definition of "cause" exonerates cigarettes from causing lung cancer.