We all know some old curmudgeon who has been smoking camels since WWI and still has not died from lung cancer. ("Too mean to die.") How can that be? And he hardly gets more than 75 mg of vitamin C daily. I had read that some people have a gene that has the ability to change some hydrocarbons in cigarette smoke into potent carcinogens.
The evidence is definite. Cancer statisticians have had trouble explaining the increased lung cancer rate despite the almost 20 percent reduction in tobacco use in males. It was 4/100,000 in 1930, then 40/100,000 in 1960, and by 1980 it had climbed to about 72/100,000. The same with women, despite the fact that ladies smoke filtered cigarettes which filters out benzopyrine and nitrosamine, two acknowledged carcinogens.
A clue: The type of cancer changed from squamous to adenocarcinoma over the years, independent of the type of the filter.
Here may be an explanation: Dr. Jerome Marmorstein found radioactive polonium in the lungs of smokers and in tobacco grown since 1950. Polonium levels tripled in American tobacco between 1938 and 1960. (Aren't they supposed to tell us those things?)
This radioactive polonium, plus some lead and radium found in cigarettes and the lungs is directly related to the fertilizer used in tobacco farm soil. The Tennessee Valley authority helped fund apatite rock grinding factories for the tobacco farmers. That's where the polonium came from. There is also cadmium in tobacco. They are bad.
Polonium emits the most carcinogenic form of radioactivity known, but has a short half-life (four months). However, it binds with radioactive lead which has a 22 year half-life, and then breaks down into radioactive polonium.
It makes sense to quit smoking those coffin nails or grow your own tobacco in your back yard. Organic tobacco growers tell me that one does not become addicted to their natural tobacco. If your grandfather is still alive and puffing away, try to at least shove some vitamin C and E, betacarotene, selenium, zinc, and manganese down his throat.
My thanks to the International Journal of Biosocial Research and Dr. Alexander Schauss of Tacoma, Washington for bringing this to my attention.
Lendon H. Smith, M.D.
Portland, Oregon
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