What I do wish to argue is that the author failed to recognize the difference between tobacco, and what is in nearly all manufactured cigarettes, that is killing people. What is killing people is that most smokers are not smoking tobacco, but half-tobacco, half recorrugated garbage off the floor made into a paper before shredding and infused with additives like 300 carcinogenic chemicals intended to increase the addictiveness of nicotine and smoking.
Pipe tobacco is just plain old tobacco, with no additives but water. Pipe smokers don't seem to suffer the fates of cigarette smokers.
Death rates for current pipe smokers were little if at all higher than for non-smokers, even with men smoking 10 pipefuls per day and with men who had smoked pipes for more than 30 years. [1]
Among the pipe smokers.... The US mortality ratios are 0.8 for non-inhalers and 1.0 for inhalers. [2]
This means pipe smokers who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that don’t inhale live longer than non-smokers.
I don't really want to criticize the author, who is merely expressing frustration and compassion and attempting to persuade smokers to quit and non-smokers to never start. But his beef is not really with natural tobacco. Big Tobacco (with their chemical death sticks) is the enemy here.
[1] https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf No. 1103, p.112
[2] ibid., No. 1103, page 92
