> There seem to be a plethora of studies showing that hand rolled cigarettes cause lung cancer at similar rates to manufactured ones.

That's good news, because it means you will have no issue citing these studies and the cancer rates of smokers of natural tobacco.

> If you’re talking about pre industrial Native Americans, it’s impossible to tell, because of a relative lack of written records and no accepted standard of what to even call lung cancer.

Lung cancer was first described medically in the mid 19th Century, a century before the Chemical Revolution in the 1950's. If smokers were dying as fast as they are today (and have been since the 1950's), someone would have noticed. But smoking only became linked to cancer in the 1950s, the very dawn of the Chemical Revolution.

> You’re entire post is so incredibly misleading. Look at the amount of tobacco smoked per capita between 1800 and the peak in the 1960s. The invention of the mass produced cigarette is certainly the cause of the increase in lung cancer deaths, but primarily because it made smoking tobacco much cheaper and therefore drastically increased consumption.

By the mid 17th Century, tobacco was so overproduced that it cost a penny for a pound of tobacco. Accounting for inflation, that penny is worth $4.29 today when a pound of loose tobacco costs about $15 and the average price of a pack of cigarettes, containing less than half an ounce of tobacco, is $8. Tobacco hasn't gotten cheaper, quite the opposite.

What dramatically increased consumption was that nicotine levels were intentionally drastically increased, and nicotine was intentionally made more addictive by chemically freeing it from its molecular base. Since the 1950's smokers of national brand cigarettes are literally freebasing nicotine. Along with the massive advertising budgets of Big Tobacco, it was a one-two-three punch that caused the peak of "tobacco" use in the 1960's. Mass production was incidental.

Again, let's not equivocate natural tobacco with what is in national brand cigarettes. I repeat, smoking anything is not healthy. But what is in cigarettes is a whole other level of lethal. The lung cancer rates of cigarette smokers is far beyond what it is for smokers of natural tobacco, and this is what the studies show.

And again, these facts disturb many as well as yourself, because Nancy Reagan and the American Lung Association did not discriminate. While a manslaughter is a bad thing, a mass murder is far worse. As we can objectively discriminate between a drunk driving fatality and Josef Stalin, so we also can scientifically discriminate between how lethal different types of smoking are.

For example there are hardly any cases of lung cancer among cannabis smokers, even if we can all agree that smoking anything is not healthy, it is far less lethal to smoke cannabis than it is to smoke, say, Marlboros.

In the same way, it is far less lethal to smoke natural tobacco than it is to smoke any mass produced national brand cigarette produced by Phillip Morris. But let me be clear to the curious: do not smoke. Smoking is very bad, and is made far worse by addiction. Once addicted to the nicotine levels in national brand cigarettes, it overwhelms the individual's agency to choose not to smoke. Nicotine addiction robs you of free will.

The only speculation I have made is why, that I believe the smoking gun for cigarettes causing lung cancer rates to skyrocket among smokers is the intentionally added 300+ known carcinogens, which started in the 1950's.

What is insidious is this all came out in the 1990's government case against Big Tobacco, the production methods and the chemical additives, all of it. Big Tobacco was fined, but they were not restricted in their production methods. They paid some of the fine, but the remainder, iirc more than half, was forgiven in the early 2000's. If the government wanted to make a dent in the cancer rates of smokers, they would have dismantled the industrial processes of producing those weird and bazaar things everyone calls cigarettes and incorrectly believe are filled with tobacco.

Tobacco has been demonized unjustly (and smokers, who are all victims, right along with it), because while tobacco has certainly killed, it's not as many as you think, while the substances that definitely have killed exponentially more continues to slip by unnoticed, the intentionally added chemicals like hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, ammonia. Hopefully we can agree that smoking hydrogen cyanide is worse for your health than smoking natural tobacco. And if we can agree on that, maybe we can also agree that it would be better for smokers, if they are unable to stop, to smoke instead just about anything other than national brand cigarettes. Maybe if we're just a little more honest about what has happened and continues to happen, we can reduce suffering and keep these poor souls around a little longer, and even if it is just a little longer.