I recently read on X (Twitter) a tribute to
the book, “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper,” by John Allen Paulos.
The author is a professor of mathematics at Temple
University, and his bio, here, is impressive. The book, still in print and available
on Kindle, was originally published in
1995. More importantly, it remains
relevant today, especially, as the reviewer put it, if you want to “become smarter and a better consumer of information who will
not fall into [the] many traps of the media.”
I don’t recall having contact with Paulos, but his tome
includes these two insightful paragraphs:
“More than 400,000
Americans die annually from the effects of smoking, but there is some
intriguing evidence that the number could be drastically reduced by the
widespread use of smokeless chewing tobacco.
Professors Brad Radu [sic] and Philip Cole recently published a note in Nature
in which they claimed that the average life expectancy for a
thirty-five-year-old smokeless tobacco user would be fifteen days shorter than
that for a thirty-five-year-old smoker.
This is in contrast to 7.8 years lost by smokers. The authors estimate that a wholesale switch
to smokeless tobacco would result in a 98 percent reduction in tobacco-related
deaths.
“Since a small
amount of tobacco lasts all day, tobacco companies would likely oppose
smokeless chewing tobacco. There has
already been strong opposition to it from some antismoking groups
because of an increase in the risk of oral cancer (which is much rarer than
lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease).
I suspect that another reason is a certain misguided sense of moral
purity – not unlike opposing the use of condoms because, unlike abstinence,
they’re not 100 percent effective. If
the numbers presented here are confirmed, however, recommending a switch to
smokeless tobacco for those smokers (and only those) who can’t quit would seem
like sound public policy.”
Paulos has a knack for interpreting numbers, and he understands
the “misguided sense of moral purity” that has dominated tobacco policy – and
killed millions of smokers – for nearly 30 years.
*Nota bene: Phil Cole and I never claimed that a “wholesale
switch” to smokeless would result in a 98 percent reduction in smoking-related
deaths, as that would not have accounted for residual deaths from former
smoking among those switchers. Rather,
we based the 98 percent reduction on the following premise: “If, instead of
smoking, smokers had used smokeless tobacco.”
It is a subtle but crucial distinction, but it does not detract from the
huge risk reduction available to individual smokers who switch.
