In article ,
ER wrote:
On 22 Nov 2003 12:30:24 GMT, (Nick Maclaren) wrote:

In article ,
Janet Baraclough wrote:

Tobacco smokers used not to believe the rumour their habit could cause
lung and circulatory disease.

That is a rare case of an officially sanctioned item of propaganda
(which it was) turning out to be more-or-less correct. It was and
is overstated, of course, and is currently being used to divert
attention away from other causes of those problems.

And more attention could be given to the fact that stopping smoking
leaves you open to other diseases:
http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/band39/b39-5.html

I was stunned when my consultant attributed my colitis to my recent quit.

Well, excluding the detail that colitis is not strictly a disease,
the same applies to pretty well any habit that has a sedative effect.
Nicotine is one of the more powerful legal substances, so its effects
are correspondingly larger than, say, cocoa.

While I agree that the information provided is so one-sided as to be
close to propaganda, there has been little doubt for at least three
decades that giving up cigarettes is almost always a good bet on the
health front. I believe that this is also true for cigars, but have
no idea whether it is so for pipes.

Certainly, when I was first on the receiving end of the propaganda,
back in the early 1960s, we were shown data that proved a very strong
association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, were told it
was causal, were shown weak data for cigars and no association for
pipes, and were told that they were working on gathering evidence to
prove it for the latter two! Even then, as a schoolboy, I had enough
of a statistical bent to recognise non-science when I saw it.

But note that none of the above proves that the conclusions are wrong,
only that drawing them is unjustified, and in the case of cigarettes
(and smoking tobacco generally), the conclusions were more-or-less
correct.

Whether, THIS time, the anti-cannabis propaganda will turn out to be
correct, I don't know. I am not desperately interested, and so will
investigate only if I bump across some real data or get sufficiently
annoyed to waste time on it.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.