The Benefits of Smoking Actually Outweigh the Risks

My opponent has conceded that tobacco does indeed have a medical history - no rebuttal on my part is needed."As for the treatment of asthma, modern medicine provides a much better alternative than smoking."I never claimed that smoking should be used to treat asthma. This would be the equivalent of drinking alcohol (i.e. a Jack Daniels) on a daily basis in order to reap these medical benefits http://www.medicaldaily.com...when clearly there are better ways to improve your health than to be a drinker."You don't need to challenge me on this because it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic."I disagree - I think that showing the medical history of tobacco is practical in that it depicts how tobacco has indeed been used in the past to treat medical issues. However, just as we don't use beer or liqour as an anesthetic, or on a daily basis in order to "lower the chance of diabetes" as it is said on the link on alcohol I provided above, I wouldn't recommend smoking in order to treat health problems. What I am proposing, and what I think I want to clarify is, that just like alcohol, smoking has it's benefits too.This may sound a bit off topic, I would also like to inform my opponent that nicotine is not just found naturally in tobacco - it is also found naturally in many peppers and tomatoes. http://www.cbsnews.com...http://www.huffingtonpost.com...So, nicotine is not the "bad guy" here - it a naturally occuring substance with some level of health benefits. So again, going back to smoking, there are reasonable amounts of nicotine in tobacco which, according to this article, can in fact decrease the smoker's risk of parkinson's disease."As of 2012, 42 million people in the United States smoke, and over 300,000 died of a tobacco related illness."The problem with using a statistics in an argument is that statistics can easily be manipulated in order to defend an arguer's position. Statistics are often used in scare tactics in order to convince people to believe something which is "based in science". I took it upon myself to do a little math problem with my opponent's statistic in order to show this to the voters, and to my opponent, the percentage of smokers who died fm a smoking related disease in 2012. Here it is:I plugged in the numerator as the total deaths as of 2012, and the denominator as the total smokers overall as of 2012.300,000 deaths / 42000000 smokers = 0.007Then, I multiplied the quotient by one hundred in order to find the percentage.0.007 X 100 = 0.7%Therefore, 0.7% of smokers died from a smoking related disease as of 2012, according to my opponents reference.I would like to take this moment to accuse anti-smoking firms of using junk science and statistics in order to fear monger others into voting for smoking prohibitions and the like. Again, the diseases which may be caused by smoking are multifactorial, and could have been caused by anything. I would also contend with my opponent's argument that smoking lowers the smoker's lifespan. Now, what I want to clarify is that I am not arguing that smoking increases longevity at all, but what I am arguing is that smoking has no effect on the smoker's lifespan. Some of the oldest people who have ever lived where chain smokers.I defend my claim with this source:http://www.forces.org...and this source: http://ehealthforum.com..."...Japanese people do not live longer because they smoke more."I completely agree with my opponent."Their diets are completely different..."Again, I completely agree with my opponent.My argument is that smoking has no effect on aging whatsoever, and the idea that it does, is more mythology than reality. It is, in casual terms, "an old wives tale". Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.