9781422273913

At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in 1979, an engine fell off a plane shortly after take-off, causing a crash that killed 270 people on board and two more on the ground. It was the worst plane crash in US history. You might wonder why a book about smoking and vaping would open with a story like that. It’s intended to give you some context for this next fact: across the world, roughly 5 million people die from smoking-related illnesses every year. That’s the equivalent of 30 plane crashes . . . every day. Or maybe look at it this way: there have been more smoking-related deaths than the total number of deaths in all of America’s wars . . . multiplied by 10. Or this: smoking kills more people every year than do guns, illegal drugs, alcohol abuse, cars, or HIV/AIDS . . . combined. Smoking is the single largest preventable cause of death in the United States. It may be hard to believe that such a deadly product is legal, particularly since drugs that cause fewer deaths, such as heroin, are not. Why this is so is a complicated story that we’ll touch on in the course of this book. We’ll also look at the reasons why tobacco is so deadly. And, importantly, we’ll look closely at the new trend of vaping. Some say it’s an improvement on smoking traditional cigarettes. But is that

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