> Lung cancer was linked to smoking well before the 1950s, there were people who noticed the link almost half a century before. If you look at a graph of tobacco consumption per capita from 1900 to 1950, the shift away from chewing tobacco and to smoking tobacco easily explains the rise in lung cancer rates.
https://econpapers.repec.org/article/agsuersja/144742.htm

You are grossly exaggerating with your assertion that any link was noticed "well before the 1950's," when the earliest historical evidence points to the late 1940s. What "people" noticed a link between lung cancer and cigarette smoking in 1850? I believe you invented this out of thin air. The Industrial Revolution also easily and more thoroughly explains the graph in that paper released when? Oh, 1956. Thanks for driving my point home.

> Cigarette consumption increased exponentially from 1900-1950

A four-fold increase indicated by the graph you cited is not an exponential increase. Again, you are exaggerating intentionally and deceptively.

> Chewing tobacco causes oral cancer, this link was made all the way back in 1903. Clearly there is something different about tobacco, natural or otherwise.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246763/

Your claim is again deceptive. The association published in 1903 was between oral cancer, tobacco, and poor nutrition. Regardless, this is a straw man argument, as I've never argued that chewing tobacco causes lung cancer; my argument only concerns smoking what is in national brand cigarettes verses natural tobacco.

> This study also finds that they have a higher nicotine content
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8075288/

>>Results: Under intense smoking conditions, nicotine in smoke of NAS cigarettes averaged 3.3(±0.7) mg/cigarette, compared to 2.4(±0.4) in other brands.

Oddly, the study does not name any of these "other brands," nor defines what intense smoking conditions actually means, but it doesn't sound like average or normal smoker behavior to me. It seems obvious this study was funded by Big Tobacco in order to level the playing field with Natural American Spirits. Big Tobacco has been going after and suing independent natural tobacco producers and retailers ever since they came on the market.

> There are precisely zero studies showing that natural cigarettes are less likely to cause lung cancer.

If true, do you even realize what this means?? Absolutely nothing. But your claim here is, in fact, false. I have already cited the Surgeon General's report, Smoking and Health, which thoroughly proves otherwise.

> The only evidence you have is that lung cancer rates increased after 1950, which is also explained by the dramatic rise in smoking tobacco between 1900 and 1950.

You are deeply confused about the meaning of rates, because your claim makes no sense. Tobacco lung cancer rates prior to 1950 are what they are. Regardless of how many people were smoking, the rates would remain flat had nothing changed. Increasing the number of smokers does not increase tobacco lung cancer rates among smokers. After the 1950s, the tobacco cancer rate itself increased dramatically among smokers. That strongly suggest something changed with the product in the 1950s. Again, more people smoking doesn't increase the possibility of lung cancer in any of them. The chances were what they were, but the odds of a smoker getting lung cancer notably increased in the 1950s.

> "Natural" pre 1950 chewing tobacco was suspected to cause oral cancer in 1903.

I have no idea why you are going on about chewing tobacco other than to advance your straw man arguments.

> "Natural" pre 1950 smoking tobacco was suspected by many to cause lung cancer in the 1930s. In 1939, over a decade before the "chemical revolution" of the 1950s, Franz Hermann Müller, published an epidemiological study linking smoking to lung cancer. In 1943, another larger study by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger reached the same conclusion.

Again, you are inventing. Every study I have seen spotlights the 1950's, more accurately the period between 1949 and 1956, as when the first valid scientific studies regarding this correlation appear. And who really can tell when Big Tobacco companies began treating their product with deadly chemicals? The 1950's Chemical Revolution was driven by DuPont and pharmaceutical companies, is somewhat specific to the increase in use of prescriptions and plastics. The Chemical Revolution proper has its origins in the 18th Century. Also, not for nothing, that famous Müller study has been debunked.[1]

> Clearly smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, whether they are pre 1950 "natural" style cigarettes or not.

Not according to the US Surgeon General's report, Smoking and Health, that I have already cited.

Your argument seems to be that smoking natural tobacco is precisely as lethal as smoking a partial tobacco product that has been infused with over 300 known carcinogens, when my argument is the precisely the opposite. My argument boils down to this: more lethal products are more lethal. I am astounded that you can not accept this.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3640840/pdf/nih...