In 1979, the Canadian Lung Association sobered many when it flatly stated: “Each year 50,000 Canadians die prematurely from the effects of smoking. Many more live on with crippled lungs and overstrained hearts.”

In 1979, the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Julius B. Richmond, issued a massive report citing “overwhelming proof” that smoking is dangerous to health. The report estimated that, every year, smoking kills about 350,000 Americans. Also, Britain’s undersecretary of state for health, Sir George Young, recently said that each year smoking causes 50,000 deaths in Britain.

How are these great numbers of deaths calculated? Basically, it is by comparing the death rates of smokers and nonsmokers. Of a comprehensive study involving over a million persons, the Encyclopedia Americana commented: “For every 100 deaths of nonsmokers during a period of observation, 168 deaths occurred among a similar and comparable group of cigarette smokers; that is, there were 68 excess deaths.”

But is such evidence conclusive? Yes, it is. “There is no controversy about the facts,” observes the Canadian Lung Association. “Thousands of careful studies have documented them. No major medical or health agency questions them.” Science 80, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, concurs: “The evidence that cigarettes shorten life is overwhelming; the causal connection is as firmly established as any in medicine.”

Conclusive studies have been made possible by the great number of persons who have smoked most of their lives. “In retrospect,” notes John Cairns, a molecular biologist and expert on cancer, “it is almost as if Western societies had set out to conduct a vast and fairly well controlled experiment in carcinogenesis [the production of cancer], bringing about several million deaths and using their own people as the experimental animals.”

Yes, millions of lives​—many, many millions—​have been cut short by smoking. “Medical studies,” explains The World Book Encyclopedia, “show that the average life expectancy of a smoker is three to four years less than that of a nonsmoker. The life expectancy of a heavy smoker​—a person who smokes two or more packages of cigarettes a day—​may be as much as eight years shorter than that of a nonsmoker.”

Two Danish investigators, Professor Poul Astrup and Dr. Knud Kjeldsen, published their findings regarding the effects of carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke. On the basis of a mass of experimental evidence, they concluded that “carbon monoxide, and not nicotine, is the toxic compound of major importance for the increased risk of smokers to develop atherosclerosis and heart disease.” And it should be noted that most smoking-caused deaths evidently occur due to blood vessel and heart disease, and not cancer.

Common sense should indicate that inhaling cigarette smoke would adversely affect a person’s respiratory tract. And evidence proves that it does. The hairlike cilia inside the bronchial tubes are damaged so that they are unable to move back and forth to sweep out germs and dirt. Also, the smoke reduces the ability of the lungs to clear themselves of inhaled impurities. This means that smokers run a greater risk of disease from harmful airborne substances.

Really, it is dishonest to imply that any cigarette is “safe.” As the top health officer in the United States, Dr. Julius Richmond said: “There is no data anywhere in the large body of scientific evidence on the dangers of smoking that holds out any hope that there is such a thing as a safe cigaret or a safe level of smoking.”