Let's be clear of one thing - the first article, even if true, does not absolve smoking from the charge of causing premature death; it simply takes cancer out of the equation, leaving still the damage to arteries, heart disease etc.

What the article does is to raise the spectre of a conspiracy theory implying that there are bad things "out there" in the air that are not smoking-related and cause cancers.

Well, blow me down with a feather! The world is riddled with such substances. Only this week in the UK hundreds of food products have had to be recalled because they contain a cancer-causing dye (sudan 1) that slipped through the net of the administration. And that is just ONE incident.

The article further implies that the cause of the "bad things in the air" is the result of some governmental action. While this would not necessarily surprise me, some proof more solid than "smoking does not cause cancer" is needed.

The line that - for me - discredits the article as being written by someone with a hidden agenda is the one that says "Having screwed your environment completely for 50,000 years, it was time for "big government" to start taking heavy diversionary action".

50,000 years of "big government"? Just slightly exaggerated pehaps? Ever so little...And these are the words of a scientist? Puhleese!