Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I really, REALLY have to wonder why anyone would smoke today, knowing the health effects. I'm not talking about people who started 50 years ago, before they were known, but someone who made the deliberate choice to start smoking in, say, the last 20 years. Why do it? Perhaps some smokers could enlighten us?
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I guess that we never think the statistics apply to us - that doesn't just go for smokers but for anyone who engages in risky behaviour - is one reason. It's also an addiction, and like many addictions is at least in part in the head as well as in the body. I'm not a terribly heavy smoker but very few of the cigarettes I smoke are pleasurable beyond taking away the craving for a cigarette.
There is also an issue of the nature of the link between, say, smoking and lung cancer. In a classical causal sense - in which if A causes B then A is a necessary and sufficient condition for B - then it is not the case that smoking causes lung cancer. Of course, it a statistical sense of causality it does - but we think we can beat the odds, and some of us will.