I’ve told you that the doctors are entertained by my throat cancer because it is exceedingly rare to see tumors like mine in a nonsmoker. Indeed. When you think of smoker’s illnesses, you naturally think of lung cancer and COPD. But smoking is associated with a variety of cancers, from nasal and oral cavity to larynx and pharynx to bronchi and lungs to pancreas, kidney, and bladder [1].
Any way you slice it, breathing sticky goop into your lungs is not a good idea [2], and the chemical components of tobacco are particularly virulent carcinogens.
There are distinct peaks in per-capita cigarette consumption of men in Britain corresponding to both world wars [3]. Women missed the World War One spike, but caught the one for World War Two.
Why should this be? There are reasons bad and (remarkably) good. On the “good” side, it’s a matter of relative risk. As Greaves [1] puts it “tobacco’s narcotic properties could nullify both fear and hunger. The result? Fields full of the dead or addicted”. Smoking among the troops was encouraged by the officer corps from the Thirty Years War, the Crimean War, the Napoleonic Wars, and of course the world wars.
For Americans, during the First World War, Pershing said “You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets. Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration; we must have thousands of tons without delay.
[4]. So tobacco use was not just a cultural phenomenon, it was an officially encouraged part of being a soldier. In 1918, the U.S. government bought the entire output of the Bull Durham Tobacco Company to ship to the doughboys overseas.
During World War Two, cigarettes were included in front-line ration tins for all soldiers, and tobacco companies shipped their entire output of popular cigarette brands—free—to Americans fighting overseas [4]. The “Best Generation” was hooked like a largemouth on a plastic worm, and smoking rates in the developed world peaked following the Second World War.
Oddly, Nazi Germany conducted substantive research on the health effects of tobacco [1]. And acted on the findings [4]. In 1943, Germany enacted a law forbidding public tobacco use by anyone under 18. Weird, huh? For all the bullshit, philosophy-driven fake scientific research conducted under the Third Reich, the one good piece of work they did was to show tobacco as the public health threat it is. Actually, Hitler was a rabid anti-smoker. This may have been just another perverted bit of results-oriented pseudo-science. Except it matched up with the real science being conducted simultaneously in the West.
Put THAT in your Philip K. Dick irony generator and…uh…smoke it!
Fresh material up across the weblog empire. Please surf on over to http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for a festive seafood dinner from the grill, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for some movie reviews, and http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for update on the cancer melodrama. Most of all, remember I love you all, and I’m grateful that you’re taking the time to read this stuff. Thanks!
Notes
[1] Mel Greaves’ Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2000] devotes a chapter to smoking and cancer and recounts the epidemiologic linkage of varied cancers and smoking.
[2] Greaves reports that Chinese cooks who stir fry intensely contract a form of lung cancer unrelated to smoking that is characteristic of inhaling hot cooking oil.
[3] http://www.laia.ac.uk/factsheets/982.pdf
[4] http://www.tobacco.org/resources/history/Tobacco_History20-1.html
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