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The greatest preventable cause of divorce — 38 Comments

  1. Ah but did they get divorced because they smoke, or smoke because they got divorced?   There is a difference.

  2. Meltemian – Like all tobacco “research” they have obviously forgotten about confounding factors.  It’s a bit like saying that bikinis cause skin cancer – they forget to take into account the extra exposure to sunlight.  Who knows what causes the correlation, but I would imagine that the stress of a divorce could be reason enough to increase smoking rates?

  3. Wars Grandad, What about smoking causing wars. Fuck it, Churchill smoked and Charle Chapl…. ahhh whassis name, hated smoking ?????

  4. That’s here in the USA where everyone gets divorced. Is divorce still illegal in Ireland? Is that because everyone smokes there? Do you have to get married in a church? Must you divorce in a church? Yeah, it’s all stupid.

  5. tt – Yup.  Divorce is now legal.  We are slowly scrambling into the twentieth century.  Civil ceremonies are commonplace too.  A Godless country to be sure….

  6. Jesus GD.. do you always go on about the smokes this much?   Do we need to put a little something stronger in that pipe huh?  🙂  
    Look, facts are smoking can’t be good for you.. it might not necessarily cause you serious harm, especially if you’re not puffing all day long..  If you enjoy the smokes and whatever else in some sort of moderate way, fuck it, what harm?  Fuck the begrudgers.  

  7. Anne – Yup.  Mind you it’s only twice this week.  I think I have grounds to grip though, given the apparent success of the mass brainwashing carried out by the Tobacco Control Industry [and it is an industry, not a charity].  The only trouble now is that you will probably have set tt off again.

  8. Let’s not forget that immortal line from Kipling…’ A women is only a women, but a good cigar is a smoke’

  9. Told you before. Don’t know why you idiots, yes idiots, can’t understand one simple truth. One out of three non smokers die of cancer. Two out of three smokers die of cancer. It’s as simple as that you feckin’ imbeciles. Are y’all really too thick to grasp this simple math? I guess you must be.
    “Duh, my uncle smoked all his life and lived to be a hundred blah feckin’ blah…” is all you dimwits can ever come up with.

  10. tt you are clearly just a bigot.. don’t be so intolerant of others.
    how rude!!*

    (*sarcasm.. please refer to previous post this week on same topic before you going on any rampage, thanking you 🙂 )

    Anyways GD..I hear you. There is always grounds to gripe.. I is a woman shur!   🙂

  11. Ho kays….  Busy day, but I see I haven’t missed much.

    Toper – Indeed.  And I refrain from asking if you like Kipling!

    tt – Good to see you in form.  I will agree about the one in three [US figures from 2010 – 567,628 cancer deaths out of a total of 1,838,501 taken from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm/] but can you cite me a source for the “Two out of three smokers die of cancer” bit please?

    Ger – Indeed.  Another confounding factor they seem to have missed?

    Anne – Hah!!  You have the measure of the old goat.  As for the griping – it is my raison d’etre as they say.  The privilege of being old.

    tt – Oh, there you are?  Nice kip?  Sweet dreams?

  12. That fact is that 1 in every 2 smokers will die of a tobacco related disease.
    How do we know it’s 1 in every 2 smokers?
    The evidence comes from a study which is often called “The Doctors Study” (Doll R, Peto R, Wheatley K, Gray R, Sutherland I. Mortality in relation to smoking: 40 years observations on male British doctors. British Medical Journal 1994; 309:901-911).

    I hope this puts it to bed GD and you strive to find a less dangerous cause celebre.

  13. Hi Granddad. Just popped in for a visit.  Ya know, check out the comments and such. 

    (checks out smoking comments)

    So, How ’bout those Yankees?  Beat Boston last night.

  14. tt – Been a very busy couple of days here, hence the delays in replying.

    I don’t deny that one in every two will die of a smoking related disease.  In fact I would imagine that the odds are even higher.  When “smoking related disease” covers such a very wide spectrum of illnesses and complaints, it is almost inevitable that a person will die “on the list” as it were.  However not one of these SRDs is unique to smokers.  It is therefore impossible to state whether the smoking caused the disease or some other factor such as genetics or other environmental factors.

    Richard Doll is well known in the field of smoking statistics.  Are you aware that most of his work is now considered tainted, not only by his own personal obsession with smoking but also by vested financial interests?  Of the study you quote, he stated that “it was devised to achieve maximum publicity for the critical link between smoking and lung cancer”  That statement alone indicates a very strong bias and that he was setting out to prove a preconceived result.  Apart from that, there are many problems associated with that particular study.  For example, many [most] of the doctors involved stopped smoking during the period of the study, so that at the end, only 6% were still smoking.  Yet apparently Doll still tried to estimate the number of pack years smoked in order to develop his correlations. 

    i could go on but life is too short.

    Howya Patcrick!  As you can see, nothing much has changed here!

    Anne – Nah!  It’s too much fun.

  15. You will never accept it no matter how overwhelming the evidence is. Your paragraph is totally irrational and makes no sense. We know that some non smokers contract lung cancer. What you seem unwilling to get your mind around is that a greater proportion of smokers contract it. I cannot for the life of me figure out why that concept/fact is so difficult for you. Well I can; it’s called bloody mindedness.

  16. Could you not, for Christ’s sake, give up on the endless banging on about the “the anti-smoking this and the anti smoking that ” and just get on with your own enjoyment of the old pipe. It’s time to stop bending our ears with this relentless campaign against, what is after all a battle that’s over. Love it or leave it, everybody back to their preferred positions and leave it at that.

  17. tt – Saying “overwhelming evidence” is like a red rag to a bull, but that apart I am not saying there is no extra risk.  What I am saying is that the whole business of Tobacco Control has gone way beyond rational science and into the murky world of political idealism and corporate funding.  The only reason that people use phrases like “overwhelming evidence” and “the battle is over” is because those phrases are used time and time again by Tobacco Control, which is the classic tool of the propaganda machine – tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. 

    Paulo – I hardly think that one [or maybe occasionally two] post a week constitutes “endless banging on”?  Maybe you are happy at the thought of the State making unilateral decisions about your lifestyle choices but I am not.  You may consider the battle to be over but sooner or later their nannying interference is going to affect you directly, unless of course you don’t drink alcohol, soft drinks, or never consume sugar, fats or salts?

  18. Further to the alleged connection between smoking and divorce – Has any scientific research (by boffins wearing lab suits) been done into kissing as a factor in marriage stability or breakdown?

    Questions to be researched:

    a) Are smokers good kissers?
    b) Are non-smokers better kissers?  or vice versa?
    The answers may validate or dilute previous research findings about the connection between smoking and divorce.

    To sort out the confusing variables involved in this sort of intimate socio-biological investigation it will be necessary to have two control groups to be tested for verification and dispassionate (!) comparison: c) both spouses who smoke and kiss; and d) gay couples with partners who are smokers and non-smokers.

    In the meantime, since Head Rambles is not a science website, readers might be invited to post anecdotal observations from their private lives. Such   observations may have more popular appeal than jargon-laden scientific data.

  19. Two points:
    1. Has anyone ever seen a death certificate saying; cayse of death – smoking ?
    2. 100% of non-smokers die. !!

  20. Ger – I’m willing to participate in any such experiment, though preferably not in the Gay Couples section.  Personally I think I’m a great kisser.  Leastwise, I have never had any complaints.  As for this not being a scientific website, I fully agree.  This post was intended to be a little bit of nonsense but you can blame the likes of tt for turning it into a debate.

    Albion – There are those on this planet who seem to think that if you forsake smoking, drinking, eating and just about anything which gives the remotest level of pleasure, that you’ll live forever.  Who the fuck wants to live forever without a few pleasures?

  21. Sorry GD.. that might have been my fault too.

    So back to a bit of nonsense.. my last, eh boyfriend – I suppose, is a heavy smoker. 
    THere were a few ‘Anna Nicole’ moments.. where I’d thought I’d kill off the auld fart in the middle of a bit of action.   Seriously, he couldn’t breath and would look like someone about to have a heart attack and that would be with me doing the work.  

    And I wouldn’t be left with any millions either.. maybe a tenner.

    Sorry bit TMI.. but true.

  22. Anne – Bloody hell!  A little bit too much information indeed!  [I had to look up the TMI bit].  Personally I would prefer the smell of cigarette smoke.  Less damaging too.

  23. Prefer the smell of cigarette smoke to what GD? 

    Than the smell of raw, unbridled, passion?  Don’t be silly.

    Had to take it easy him on him though..   seriously, he was fucked from the smokes – in my anecdotal observations anyways.  
    I wouldn’t say the smokes caused the demise of our wonderful relationship.   But they didn’t have a positive impact either.   

  24. Howya Mick!  Indeed it has been a while.  As for the link….. [*cough*] …  I’ll leave that to Anne.  My question is how you came across that site in the first place?  Be honest.

  25. Ha! I was just as ‘shocked as yerself’! TBH (yep I know you’ll have to interpret that) it was just a Google moment prompted by Anne’s revelations 🙂

  26. Ha. Go way out of it Mick.  Someone was looking up porn on the internets! 
    You completely immoral, depraved man..   GD report him immediately.

    Anyways I was only following Ger’s suggestion above – “readers might be invited to post anecdotal observations from their private lives”..     

    Sorry GD.  I don’t think you expected the thread to degenerate this much. You can blame Ger for that one.

  27. Mick – “I was just as ‘shocked as yerself”  Yeah.  Right.  A Google Moment my arse.  [I have some intersting links BTW, if you want to do swapsies?]  [And I do know what BTW, TBH and even FYI mean].

    Anne – You’re a great one for tossing the blame around?!  Though as with tt, I confess Ger must take some of the blame credit.

    I love the way some of these threads go whacking off at a strange tangent!  [and by “whacking off”, I mean heading in an unpredictable direction.  Stop sniggering down the back.]

  28. Anne and others: No, I wasn’t trying to divert the thread, although creative diversions can be wholesome pastimes, can’t they? I was querying the assertion that Smoking causes Divorce. I think that assertion requires proof based on scientifically verifiable facts and logical Aristotelian argument. Now the verified fact that a large percentage of divorcees are smokers doesn’t prove that smoking causes divorce, since smoking may in some instances be a response to marriage under stress and not the other way round.

    Scientific socio-biological experiments are needed in order to prove or disprove the assertion that Smoking causes Divorce.

    While we are waiting for scientists-sociologists to apply for research grants to the Science Council of Ireland, the Marriage Guidance Council or the Industrial Development Authority we can fill in some of the time, not twiddling our fingers or chewing jelly babies (uncreative diversions) but in collecting helpful anecdotal data from website visitors that might guide scientist-sociologists in their quest when the money and the time comes. So consider all offered personal anecdotes about smoking and kissing (NB: I didn’t refer to anything that goes beyond smooching and snogging)  to be sincere aids to future scientific enquiry.

  29. Ger – What does it matter if you do divert the thread?  Nothing like a bit of diversion?  When I wrote this piece, it was intended to a be lighthearted piece  – “Look what the twats are trying to claim now”.  The smoking/divorce link is so far beyond even tenuous to be laughable.  I presume however if we are to pursue our investigations into the subject then I would be eligible to apply for a very large grant? 

  30. If you applied to august bodies like the Science Council of Ireland for a research grant aimed at proving or disproving a causal connection between Smoking and Divorce GD, you’d need to convince the granting body that you are capable of scientific, not anecdotal, research on the matter.

    As this thread is now about to fade from your home page I think that you could take up the matter in a new post in the near future. Meanwhile keep puffing. The autumn leaves are looking mushy in this wet spell we’re having, aren’t they?

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