A newspaper ad, full-page. Cigarettes kill more Americans every year than car wrecks, plane crashes, AIDS, alcohol, drugs, suicides and homicides combined. It's a terrifying statistic. Over and over we have been told that smoking is not just unhealthy, but massively and catastrophically lethal.
Tobacco is like an atomic bomb on the horizon.
Ghastly as such rhetoric is, worse is on the way. Except that it doesn't. The damage from cigarettes is far less than it is made out to be. Levy is an expert in law and finance who teaches statistics at Georgetown University Law Center. Marimont is a mathematician and scientist who spent 37 years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Institute of Health.