Pipe smoking. It saves lives. :)

[Cool Breeze]

A cool clip from Bertrand Russell.

[Pipe Smoker]

Furthermore…

The 1964 US Surgeon General Report on Smoking and Health said that the mortality ratio of pipe smokers (that didn't inhale) was 80% that of non smokers. C. Everett Koop, a tobacco Nazi, didn't like that good result for pipe smokers, so he fiddled with the data and analytical methods, then issued a subsequent report, showing poorer results for pipe smokers.

Another study, performed by three public health agencies, found that pipe smokers of all sorts lived two years longer, on average, than non smokers. The agencies were the N. W. Pennsylvania Lung Association, and regional chapters of the American Cancer Society, and American Heart Association. The study was published in "The Journal of Breathing" (a tobacco Nazi publication). There was some hand-wringing over the good results for pipe smokers (maybe there was a socio-economic explanation for those results, they wept).

[Bruck]

...Another study, performed by three public health agencies, found that pipe smokers of all sorts lived two years longer, on average, than non smokers. The agencies were the N. W. Pennsylvania Lung Association, and regional chapters of the American Cancer Society, and American Heart Association. The study was published in "The Journal of Breathing" (a tobacco Nazi publication). There was some hand-wringing over the good results for pipe smokers (maybe there was a socio-economic explanation for those results, they wept).

I've heard those stats before and I have to file them in the "causation vs. correlation" category. I can see pipe smoking as not necessarily shortening the lifespan, but not lengthening it either. I'm thinking it's something along the lines of pipe smokers spend more time puffing tasty smoke and less time hang-gliding Or perhaps, pipe smokers are less prone to stress-related maladies. Or maybe pipe smokers are generally already older and therefore haven't succumbed to anything that would have killed them young.