After four centuries of smoking in Western countries — longer in others, especially by Indian tribes and other indigenous peoples — lung cancer was so rare that many doctors had not heard of it.

Smoking might help alleviate lung ailments

Most readers will say, ‘Smoking causes lung cancer’. Yet, as I wrote last year, most smokers will never get lung cancer. That is not an endorsement of smoking or vaping, just an attempt to show how statistics can be manipulated, biased and presented to the public.

Whilst the underlying source seems to have disappeared from the Internet, Wisp of Smoke summarises findings on tuberculosis (first emphasis in the original, the one in purple mine):

Nicotine suppresses cell death of neurons (it also promotes vascular growth factor, e.g. growth and branching of capillaries). (Another advantage of nicotine is that Nicotine Slays TB. The link to this mainstream article is prefaced by this comment, “This article was written in 2001 and since then the ban on smoking in public places and taxing tobacco has grown. Extremely-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis strains will continue to spread and multiply. The resulting global XDR-TB epidemic will be an untreatable and unstoppable calamity.”)

I wondered. Although I could not find more on TB, there was something else — on lung cancer.

Lung cancer rare until 1940s

The late Joe Vialls was what one would call today a citizen journalist. He debunked much popular science concerning health, especially smoking.

In one of his articles, ‘Smoking Helps Protect Against Lung Cancer’, Vialls states that lung cancer was virtually unknown after five centuries of smoking until the 1940s which brought experiments and detonation of nuclear weapons (emphasis in the original):

By the early 20th Century almost one in every two people smoked, but the incidence of lung cancer remained so low that it was almost immeasurable. Then something extraordinary happened on July 16, 1945: a terrifying cataclysmic event that would eventually cause western governments to distort the perception of smoking forever.

This was the notorious “Trinity Test”, the first dirty nuclear weapon to be detonated in the atmosphere. A six-kilogram sphere of plutonium, compressed to supercriticality by explosive lenses, Trinity exploded over New Mexico with a force equal to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT. Within seconds, billions of deadly radioactive particles were sucked into the atmosphere to an altitude of six miles, where high-speed jet streams could circulate them far and wide.

Atmospheric testing of this nature did not stop until 1963, by which time:

more than 4,200 kilograms of plutonium had been discharged into the atmosphere. Because we know that less than one microgram [millionth of a single gram] of inhaled plutonium causes terminal lung cancer in a human, we therefore know that your friendly government has lofted 4,200,000,000 [4.2 Billion] lethal doses into the atmosphere, with particle radioactive half-life a minimum of 50,000 years.

‘Prove’ smoking — not atmospheric testing — causes lung cancer

By 1963, lung cancer went from being a rare disease to something being diagnosed with increasing regularity. What could explain it? (Emphases in purple are mine.)

The only obvious substance that people inhaled into their lungs, apart from air, was tobacco smoke, so the government boot was put in. Poorly qualified medical “researchers” suddenly found themselves overwhelmed with massive government grants all aimed at achieving the same end-result: “Prove that smoking causes lung cancer”. Real scientists (especially some notable nuclear physicists) smiled grimly at the early pathetic efforts of the fledgling anti-smoking lobby, and lured them into the deadliest trap of all. The quasi-medical researchers were invited to prove their false claims under exactly the same rigid scientific rules that were used when proving that radioactive particles cause lung cancer in mammals.

However:

The real scientists had the quasi-medical researchers by the throat, because “pairing” the deadly radioactive particle experiment with the benign tobacco smoke experiment, proved conclusively for all time that smoking cannot under any circumstances cause lung cancer. And further, in one large “accidental” experiment they were never allowed to publish, the real scientists proved with startling clarity that smoking actually helps to protect against lung cancer.

Of course, government-generated radioactive rubbish around the world couldn’t be revealed to the public. Smoking, particularly cigarettes, had to be perceived to be responsible for the surge in lung cancer:

Government pressure was immediately brought to bear and the facts suppressed, but this did not completely silence the real scientists. Tongue-in-cheek perhaps, Professor Schrauzer, President of the International Association of Bio-inorganic Chemists, testified before a U.S. congressional committee in 1982 that it had long been well known to scientists that certain constituents of tobacco smoke act as anti-carcinogens (anti-cancer agents) in test animals. He continued that when known carcinogens (cancer-causing substances) are applied to the animals, the application of constituents of cigarette smoke counter them.

Nor did Professor Schrauzer stop there. He further testified on oath to the committee that “no ingredient of cigarette smoke has been shown to cause human lung cancer“, adding that “no-one has been able to produce lung cancer in laboratory animals from smoking.” It was a neat answer to a rather perplexing problem. If government blocks publication of your scientific paper, take the alternate route and put the essential facts on the written congressional record!

Predictably, this hard truth drove the government and quasi-medical “researchers” into a frenzy of rage. By 1982 they had actually started to believe their own ridiculous propaganda, and were not to be silenced by eminent members of the scientific establishment. Quite suddenly they switched the blame to other “secret” ingredients put into cigarettes by the tobacco companies. “Yes, that must be it!” they clamored eagerly, until a handful of scientists got on the phone and pointed out that these same “secret” ingredients had been included in the mice experiments, and had therefore also been proved incapable of causing lung cancer.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, ‘smoking causes lung cancer’ became a mantra in medical school. Think of the tens of thousands who were studying and earning degrees in medicine during those years — not to mention between the 1980s and the present day!

Vialls’ article states that any medical student who questioned this was told to be quiet or to stop being stupid.

To counter this, more propaganda emerged, namely the black lungs. As I said three years ago, an autopsy on a smoker’s lungs will reveal pink lungs, just as in a non-smoker. Black lungs are present in those — mostly miners — who suffer from the eponymous disease. The warning pictures on cigarette packets are fake. Many are, in fact, photoshopped.

Vialls explains:

Even blind faith needs a system of positive reinforcement, which in this case became the advertising agencies and the media. Suddenly the television screens were flooded with images of terribly blackened “smoker’s lungs”, with the accompanying mantra that you will die in horrible agony if you don’t quit now. It was all pathetic rubbish of course. On the mortuary slab the lungs of a smoker and non-smoker look an identical pink, and the only way a forensic pathologist can tell you might have been a smoker, is if he finds heavy stains of nicotine on your fingers, a packet of Camels or Marlboro in your coat pocket, or if one of your relatives unwisely admits on the record that you once smoked the demon weed.

The black lungs? From a coal miner, who throughout his working life breathed in copious quantities of microscopic black coal dust particles. Just like radioactive particles they get caught deep in the tissue of the lungs and stay there forever. If you worked down the coal mines for twenty or more years without a face mask, your lungs will probably look like this on the slab.

It should be noted that hospitals transplant lungs from smokers into non-smokers.

How smoking protects the lungs

The following will shock most people reading this.

Just remember that ever since we have been alive, we have been reading and hearing the meme that smoking causes lung cancer.

However, just to recap, lung cancer was not commonplace until the 1940s.

Over the past three decades, many smokers became ex-smokers.

Yet — and some non-smokers might not know this — despite many fewer smokers on the planet, lung cancer rates continue to rise, especially in never-smokers.

How can this be? And how is it that most smokers never get lung cancer?

Vialls has the most plausible answer, although non-smokers will not like it:

Many people ask exactly how it is that those smoking mice were protected from deadly radioactive particles, and even more are asking why real figures nowadays are showing far more non-smokers dying from lung cancer than smokers. Professor Sterling of the Simon Fraser University in Canada is perhaps closest to the truth, where he uses research papers to reason that smoking promotes the formation of a thin mucous layer in the lungs, “which forms a protective layer stopping any cancer-carrying particles from entering the lung tissue.”

This is probably as close as we can get to the truth at present, and it does make perfect scientific sense. Deadly radioactive particles inhaled by a smoker would initially be trapped by the mucous layer, and then be ejected from the body [coughing] before they could enter the tissue.

Well, no one will fund further study on that in the present climate.

Before accepting decades-old ‘truths’ on health, it is useful — sometimes unpalatable — to research what is being suppressed. What we find may well surprise us and give us something more to consider.