Haha, yah but some people don't seem to understand this, especially since tobacco has been demonized so much.
Tea is generally considered healthy by the mainstream, but that doesn't mean smoking it is going to be so great.
Another example would be something like kale. You would expect it to be unhealthy to smoke the stuff lol.
It's possible that both of these examples could be worse than tobacco, who the heck knows. Nobody is smoking 2 packs of kale a day for 50 years.
Many of the smoke risks can me greatly mitigated by using a good filter. Activated charcoal filter would be best but no company makes cigarettes with these. You have to buy them yourself and RYO. Older manufacturing practices in the 1940s and 1950s used charcoal in some of the filters and the incidence of lung, esophageal, mouth/throat, etc cancers (most commonly linked to smoking) was very low during those times.
I am not saying smoking is a slam dunk healthy habit. But it is quiet obvious it is now a political issue and as such its truth cannot be reliably judged based on officially sanctioned studies. Again, some Caribbean countries average 4-5 cigars per day (for males) combined with a glass of rum (usually) with each cigar. Yet, many of those countries have among the highest life expectancy and among the lowest cancer rates in the world. Their number one killer is usually either starvation, natural disaster, or infectious disease. Not cancer, diabetes, CVD, dementia, etc.
BBC NEWS | Americas | Cigars and sex 'boost Cuba lives'
So, even if you think the BBC link is far fetched and smoking is not responsible for the increased longevity at the very least you have to admit that it is certainly not reducing lifespan. And that last part flies in the face of everything published on smoking in the last 30 years claiming that each cigarette/cigar shortens life by several minutes, not to mention the increase in risk for pretty much all diseases.