Cigarettes don't cause cancer

I had an interesting conversation with one of my students the other day. This student is in his/her late teens to early twenties and we were discussing bad habits and another student threw in smoking as a bad habit. Eventually the conversation wound itself around to the fact smoking is a really bad habit because it causes cancer. This student became very passionate about the fact that he/she believes that there's no data or facts to prove smoking causes cancer. Even on a pack of cigarettes it's noted that smoking can cause cancer. There's a definite correlation and it's almost unbelievable that a person would ignore all the information out there on smoking like it were a conspiracy theory. We can put walking on the moon and getting lung cancer from cigarettes in the same category--doesn't happen. It's all made up. The truth is we'll tell ourselves (myself included) whatever personal story we have to so we can believe that and keep on keeping on. We lie to ourselves basically. If not about cigarette smoking, then we lie to ourselves about something else. Winston Churchill once said, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." This is so true. In fact, yesterday a friend put this quote up on Facebook and it got a lot of comments. I think if Winston were still kicking around he would have appreciated what I added to the quote. And when the truth does get its pants on it suddenly realizes it left its fly open.