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Re:Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed ca... by patmcc on Saturday July 29, 2023 @06:17PM (#36925302)
Smoking cuts your life expectancy by something like ~10 years. Most of those smoking deaths are people who've already smoked 30+ years; there's not a lot we can do to prevent those deaths now, even if they all stopped smoking tomorrow. They'd still get cancer and everything else at higher rates. We've also done a pretty good job at lower smoking rates, especially among young people. Sure, we can ban or restrict tobacco more (maybe we should) but the "public health crisis" is mostly done.

Opiate addiction cuts life expectancy by ~35 years. And getting them onto safer drugs would save lives very immediately. There's stuff that could be done, and everyone knows it, and it's not happening. That's the public health crisis.

edit: and, yes, also, opiates are also more socially destructive, due largely to the criminality.

Re:Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed ca... by martinald on Saturday July 29, 2023 @06:35PM (#36925468)
This isn't really true. Most of the death from smoking comes from other lung & heart problems, not cancer.

As such even if you smoke for many decades and quit your risk decreases dramatically pretty quickly, even within days.

Re:Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed ca... by patmcc on Saturday July 29, 2023 @08:38PM (#36926432)
Quite an interesting chart near the bottom of this page - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/quit_smoking/how_to_quit/benefit... - doesn't quantify everything, unfortunately, but yeah even after a year the "risk of heart attack drops sharply". Interesting.
Re:Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed ca... by pfdietz on Saturday July 29, 2023 @08:44PM (#36926482)
And even cancer is getting more treatable these days. Lung cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence (although it often does still kill.)