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If you were smoking supermarket junk cigarettes (especially filtered, or god forbid lights), you weren't smoking real tobacco leaf but toxic additive laden reconstituted 'tobacco sheets', along with non-biodegradable filter fibers (which thus have to be coughed out wrapped in phlegm). And in recent years you were likely smoking fire retardants (from the mandated "Fire Safe Cigarettes", highly toxic and noxious stuff).

At present, the only legal way to smoke the real 'gift of gods' is to buy additive free natural tobacco (several companies make these) and stuff or roll your own (see RYO intro here and forum here).

Another damaging effect you suffered, judging from your other comments here, was witch doctor effect -- your belief and fear that smoking was harming you was in fact killing you. Being civilized you may believe yourself immune to such primitive effect (which can kill only some superstitious savages). In fact, you are likely as awed by the "science" of our modern medicine men as any naked savage ever was by the "powers" and knowledge of his medicine men. The chronic stress of believing deeply, as you seem to do, that each puff is peeling away your life force, killing you bit by bit, is doing the same kind of damage that kills some savage after his medicine man points a monkey bone at him, shakes it, telling him he will die (unless he submits and pays up to lift the death curse, which is roughly what our medicine men are doing to smokers). Our medicine men use more modern props than monkey bone, but the physiology behind the effectiveness of such 'death curse' is exactly the same for you as it is for the any 'naked savage'. In fact, this deadly effect in modern settings has been quantified on none other than smokers and the 'death curse' upon them:

There was a study in Heidelberg, described by Professor Eysenck in Psychological Reports (1989) in which 528 men were asked whether they, as smokers, were convinced that they would be very likely to develop lung cancer, heart disease, or other 'smoking related diseases'.

The 72 who answered 'yes', while admitting that their views were taken from information in the media, had an almost three times higher death rate at the end of 13 years than those who were not so influenced.

Fear can kill. This has been known since disease was first studied. We are entitled to wonder how many people have been killed more by the fear of 'smoking related diseases' than by any actual disease itself. (from a book "Murder a Cigarette: the Smoking Debate" by J. Hatton, R. Harris)