As a millennial growing up it was beaten into our head that smoking was a death sentence. I recently looked up what the actual cancer rate among smokers was... about 125k people in the US die of lung cancer annual. 25 million people smoke annually. That is a 0.5% chance for occasional smokers. Even if you smoke a pack a day your entire life, the cancer rate is less than 15%.

I am in no way saying it is okay to smoke, there are obviously other health risks associated with it... but researching that made me feel much better about that one pack a year I buy for vacation.

Cigarettes kill about 480,000 people in the US annually. Lung cancer isn't the only kind of cancer you get from smoking cigarettes, and cancer isn't the only way it can lead to your death, so it seems very strange to only pay attention to lung cancer here.

You don't need lung cancer to have an absolutely miserable decline and death from COPD, for example.

https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...

And that 125k includes people who don't smoke and never have. Sometimes the DNA in a single cell just gets fucked up in just the right way to cause cancer. Smoking just increases the odds.

Cancer is not the only complication...

The actual infection rates for some STIs are also similarly low, per-encounter. But they are high enough that if you are promiscuous and have a large number of at-risk encounters then you will eventually get a bad roll of the dice.