Last week I wrote about factoid-driven myths that just refuse to die. In less than a week over 1.145 million people have clicked on the piece. The median number of readers across 59 of my Conversation columns until now has been 4,550, with the previously most-read piece attracting 55,285 readers.

There’s plainly a big appetite for smoking myth-busting, so here are ten more.

​“Today’s smokers are all hardcore, addicted smokers who can’t or won’t give up”

This claim is the essence of what is known as the “hardening hypothesis”1: the idea that decades of effort to motivate smokers to quit has seen all the low hanging fruit fall from the tree, leaving only deeply addicted, heavy smokers today.

The key index of addicted smoking is number of cigarettes per day. This creates a small problem for the hardening hypothesis: in nations and states where smoking has reduced most, average daily cigarettes smoked by continuing smokers has gone down, not up. This is exactly the opposite of what the hardening hypothesis would predict if remaining smokers were mostly hardcore.

​“Smoking is pleasurable”

Repeated studies have found that around 90 percent of smokers regret having started, and some 40 percent make an attempt to quit each year. There’s no other product with even a fraction of such customer disloyalty.

But I’m always amused at some die-hard smokers’ efforts explain that they smoke for pleasure and so efforts to persuade them to stop are essentially anti-hedonistic tirades. Many studies2 have documented that the “pleasure” of smoking centres around the relief and pleasure smokers get when they have not smoked for a while and the next nicotine hit takes away the discomfort and craving they have been experiencing. This argument is a bit like saying that being beaten up every day is something you want to continue with, because hey, it feels so good when the beating stops for a while.

​“Light and mild cigarettes deliver far less tar and nicotine to the smoker than standard brands”

Several nations have outlawed cigarette descriptors like “light” and “mild” because of evidence that such products do not deliver lower amounts of tar and nicotine to smokers, and so are deceptive. The allegedly lower yields from cigarettes labelled this way resulted from a massive consumer fraud. Cigarette manufacturers obtained these low readings by laboratory smoking machine protocols which took a standardized number of puffs, at a standardized puff velocity. The smoke inhaled by the machine was then collected in glass “lungs” behind the machine and the tar and nicotine weighed to give the readings per cigarette.

But the companies didn’t tell smokers two things. So-called light or mild cigarettes had tiny, near-invisible pin-prick perforations just on the filter (see picture). These holes are not covered by the “lips” or “fingers” of the laboratory smoking machine, allowing extra air to be inhaled and thus diluting the dose of tar and nicotine being collected.

But when smokers use these products, two things happen. Their lips and fingers partially occlude the tiny ventilation holes, thus allowing more smoke to be inhaled, and smokers unconsciously “titrate” their smoking to obtain the dose of nicotine that their brain’s addiction centres demand: they can take more puffs, inhale more deeply, leave shorter butt lengths or smoke more cigarettes.

Today, where use of these descriptors has been stopped, the consumer deception3 continues with the companies using pack colours to loudly hint to smokers about which varieties are “safer”.

​ “Filters on cigarettes remove most of the nasty stuff from cigarettes”

We’ve all seen the brown stain in a discarded cigarette butt. But what few have seen is how much of that same muck enters the lungs and how much stays there. This utterly compelling video4 demonstration shows how ineffective filters are in removing this deadly sludge. A smoker demonstrates holding the smoke in his mouth and then exhales it through a tissue paper, leaving a tell-tale brown stain. He then inhales a drag deep into his lungs, and exhales it into a tissue. The residue is still there, but in a much reduced amount. So where has the remainder gone? It’s still in the lungs!

​“Governments don’t want smoking to fall because they are addicted to tobacco tax and don’t want to kill a goose that lays golden eggs”

This is perhaps the silliest and fiscally most illiterate argument we hear regularly about smoking. If it was true that governments really wanted to maximise smoking and tax receipts, they are doing a shockingly bad job. Smoking in Australia has fallen almost continuously since the early 1960s. In six of the ten years 2001–2011, the Australian government received less tobacco tax receipts than it did the year before.5

Plainly, as smoking continues to decline, diminishing tax returns will occur although this will be cushioned by rising population, which will include some smokers. In the meantime, tobacco tax is a win-win for governments and the community. It reduces smoking6 like nothing else, and it provides substantial transfer of funds from smokers to government for public expenditure. Those of us who don’t smoke do not squirrel away what we would have otherwise spent on smoking in a jam jar under the bed. We spend it on other goods and services, benefitting the economy too.

​“Most smokers die from smoking-caused diseases late in life, and we’ve all got to die from something”

Smoking increases the risk of many different diseases, and collectively these take about ten years7 off normal life expectancy from those who get them. Smoking is by far the greatest risk factor for lung cancer. In Australia, average age of death for lung cancer is 71.4,8 while life expectancy is currently 80.1 for men and 84.3 for women,9 meaning that on average men diagnosed with lung cancer lose 8.7 years and women 12.9 years (mean 10.8 years). Of course, some lose many more (Beatle George Harrison died at just 58, Nat King Cole at 45).

If a 20 a day smoker starts at 17 and dies at 71, 54 years of smoking would see 394,470 cigarettes smoked. At ten puffs per cigarette, that’s some 3.94 million point-blank lung bastings. It takes about six minutes to smoke a cigarette. So at 20 a day, smokers smoke for two hours each day. Across 54 years, that’s a cumulative 1,644 days of smoking (4.5 years of continual smoking if you put it all together). So by losing ten years off life expectancy, each cigarette smoked takes about 2.2 times the time it takes to smoke it off the life expectancy that might otherwise have been enjoyed.

​“Smokers cost the health system far more than the government receives from tobacco tax.”

In June 2015, a senior staff member of Australian libertarian senator David Leyonhjlem, Helen Dale, tweeted: “Evidence is unhealthy choices are cheaper for the state – the person dies instead of staying on life support.”10 In Australia, a now old report looking at 2004/05 data estimated the gross healthcare costs attributable to smoking “before adjustment for savings due to premature death” were $1.836 billion.11 In that financial year, the government received $7,816.35 billion in customs and excise duty and GST.

Someone who thought that the fiscal ledger was all that mattered in good government might conclude from this that smokers easily pay their way and perhaps we should even encourage smoking as a citizen’s patriotic duty. With smokers being considerate enough to die early, these noble citizens lay down their lives early and thus contribute “savings due to premature death” like failing to draw a state pension or needing aged care services late in life. Philip Morris notoriously gave this advice to the new Czech government in 1999.12

Other assessments though, might well point to the values inherent in such advice. History’s worst regimes have often seen the economically non-productive as human detritus deserving death. Primo Levi’s unforgettable witnessing of this mentality in Auschwitz comes to mind.

​“Big Tobacco is starting to invade low-income nations, now that smoking is on the wane in the wealthiest nations.”

Sorry, but US and British manufacturers have been aggressively marketing cigarettes in places like China since the early years of last century. These collectible posters13 show many featuring Chinese women. But the large populations, the often lax tobacco control policies and the higher corruption indexes of many low- and middle-income nations make many of these nirvanas for Big Tobacco. There are fewer more nauseating experiences than reading the oleaginous corporate social responsibility reports of tobacco transnationals and then seeing how they operate in smokers’ paradises like Indonesia. This documentary says it all.14

​“Millions of cigarette butts on the world’s beaches leach lots of toxic chemicals into oceans”

Cigarette butts are the most discarded items in all litter. Every year uncounted millions if not billions are washed down gutters in storm water and find their way into rivers, harbours and oceans. Cigarette filters and butts contain toxic residue and experiments have shown that when laboratory fish are placed in containers with leachate extracted from used cigarette butts for for 48 hours, 50 percent of the fish die.15 From this, we sometimes hear people exclaim that cigarette butts are not just unsightly, but they “poison the oceans”.

But a confined laboratory container does not remotely mirror real life exposures in oceans or rivers. There are some 1,338,000,000 cubic kilometres of water in the world oceans, so the contribution of cigarette butts to the toxification of all this could only excite a homeopath.

If we want to reduce tobacco litter, we need not wander into such dubious justifications. The best way by far is to keep reducing smoking. Industry attempts at portraying themselves as corporately responsible by running dinky little clean-up campaigns or distributing personal butt disposal canisters distracts from their efforts to keep as many smoking as possible.

​“Tobacco companies care deeply about their best customers dying early”

Naturally, all businesses would rather their customers lived as long as possible so that the cash registers can keep ringing out long and loud. Tobacco companies wish their products didn’t kill so many, but worship the god nicotine for its iron grip on so many.

 Visit any tobacco transnational’s website and you will find lots of earnest and caring talk about the companies’ dedication to doing all they can to reduce the terrible harm caused by their products. All the major companies have now invested heavily in electronic cigarettes, so isn’t this a sign that they taking harm reduction seriously?

It might be if the same companies were showing any sign of taking their feet off the turbo-drive accelerator of opposing effective tobacco control policies. But they are doing nothing of the sort. All continue to aggressively attack and delay any policy like tax hikes, graphic health warnings, plain packaging and advertising bans, wherever in the world these are planned for introduction.

For all their unctuous hand-wringing about their mission to reduce harm, they are all utterly determined to keep as many smoking as possible. Big Tobacco’s business plan is not smoking or e-cigarettes. It’s smoking and e-cigarettes. Smoke when you are able to, vape when you can’t. It’s called dual use and some 70 percent of vapers are doing just that. The tragedy now playing out in some nations is that some gormless tobacco control experts are blind to this big picture.