innes your comments on this subject really surprise me; I must point out that my only direct smoking experience was as a fifteen year old, rolling a cigarette in a piece of newspaper and trying to smoke it. Well I felt sick like a dog and did not try again untill some 6 years later, when going on a bus home from a movie when I was teased so much that I gave in and smoked half a cigarette. After getting off the bus I felt sick and when I laid on the bed my head spun and I felt like like vomitting, and that went on for 4 hours and wandering through the hostel I lived at that time, at 3AM the cleaner turned up and asked me if I was drunk.

That was the end of my smoking directly, but I did smoke a lot indirectly and was glad when the government banned smoking on trains, which I used to drive.

You seem to suggest that the cancer rate has not increased, I cannot disprove the statistics, but observing my work mates, I noticed how many smokers died before retiring at 65 or just after. A friend of our family we used to play cards with, replied to my complaint against the secon hand smoke, if you want to keep my friendship, you have to put up with it.

Now maybe ,if I had the courage to tell her, what to do with her friendship, maybe she would still be alive today, yet she died at 63.

Pipe smokers were the worst for people around them, because I think that they did not inhale like cigarette smokers, but the passive smokers copped the lot.

hawil, we are reading different scripts. You stated:-

"You seem to suggest that the cancer rate has not increased, I cannot

disprove the statistics....."

In actual fact, what I stated was that in spite of smoking diminishing

dramatically over the years, the incidence of lung cancer is increasing

dramatically. According to every statistic that I have read, there does not

appear to be any correlation between smoking & lung cancer.

My family doctor told me that most foriegn matter we inhale has the potential to cause lung cancer. Coal miners, plasterers, builders etc., etc......ANYONE who works in an environment where there is dust or other foriegn matter in the air has a higher risk of developing the disease.

I think anyone would have to be pretty naieve to argue that smoking does NOT lung cause cancer, but there are certainly plenty of OTHER causes.