Smoking revisited

In the last few decades, the lung cancer rate in China has risen sharply, but the culprit is not smoking; it’s pollution.
This is according to a piece by Robert Hoffman posted on the American Thinker website.
‘The war on tobacco, breathlessly waged by liberals and others who yearn to command everyone and everything, is based on the hysteria that smoking and being around the reprobates who smoke, as the surgeon general has declared, kill us,’ he said. ‘That countless other things do is dismissed as a distraction, not germane to the clear scientific facts.
‘A look at the clear scientific facts actually conveys quite a different conclusion.
‘According to nearly all the studies done, as opposed to the mere assertions, about 10 percent of lifelong cigarette-smokers contract any stripe of cancer. Those who consume three or more packs a day have a three-to-four-percent higher rate of lung cancer than the non-smoking population.
‘And among that non-smoking population, 10 to 15 percent are likely to get cancer of anything.  ‘Thus, it would appear that in the absence of post hoc ergo propter hoc, you are more likely to be felled by cancer if you don’t smoke.’
Hoffman goes on to say that during the past few decades, the lung cancer rate in China has risen sharply, but that the culprit is not smoking.
The culprit is, he says, pollution, and the rate is considerably higher in the country’s smog-ridden cities.