"Having spent 50 years of my life desperately trying to escape from secondhand smoke, I feel strange having to say that I am not nearly so sure that the diseases attributed to smoking are indeed caused by smoking. There are too many "wide-brush" statements about "XXX lives lost to smoking" yet the people making them have no idea of the underlying disease process by which smoking is supposed to cause death.
It isn't cancer, as it is now pretty clear that cancer rises from Th1 inflammation and an incompetent immune system (for example, review the paper at http://www.tbiomed.com/content/pdf/1742-4682-3-6.pdf - especially the observation about Kaposi's sarcoma).
Nobody has come up with a molecular rationale for how smoking causes cancer. Maybe they are all making the same mistake of over-reaching which we see in the Vitamin D research
In no way am I saying that smoking is not bad for the immune system, and for the body as a whole, am just not convinced it is quite as bad as most folks would have us believe. We need to make sure we focus our energies on the cause of disease, for it is the cause which we have to defeat.
