Though Big Antitobacco (trial lawyers, professional "charity" shakedown/Democratic Party supporters like the American Cancer Society, etc.) doesn't want you to know about it, the reality is that tobacco just is nowhere near as dangerous as they'd deluded everyone into believing, especially if you're not genetically predisposed to such things as lung cancer.
Note that I'm not saying use of tobacco products has no risk or health detriments whatsoever; it obviously does. But the reality is that the vast majority of regular tobacco users will never have to deal with any serious health problem that can be directly tied to tobacco use. (Did you know that if you acquire any sort of cardiovascular disease, your heart problem is AUTOMATICALLY lumped into the statistics as a "tobacco-related disease" if you ever smoked regularly at any point in your life? Even if you don't get it until you're 90? Even though there is not one iota of direct evidence that your heart problem wasn't caused by genetic predisposition, old age, or anything else?)
It's a tradeoff, for sure. A heavy smoker is pretty certain to have a problem running marathons, and the odds of you getting something as a result of tobacco use are definitely a lot better than they are of winning the lottery. (I believe the lung cancer rate amongst lifetime heavy smokers is 1 in 100, for example. But I bet most people think the lung cancer rate is more like 1 in 5.)
George Burns smoked like a fiend, and lived to 100. Andy Kaufman never touched a cigarette in his life and died of a particularly nasty form of lung cancer at age 35. The connections just are not as simple and clear-cut as Big Antitobacco has tricked you into believing.
By the way, they're about to start offering a test to let you see if you have the gene that makes you particularly susceptible to lung cancer. It's going to become very interesting over the next couple of decades, as science and technology advance forward and discover new ways to treat, cure and eventually prevent the medical problems caused by tobacco usage, at the same time as tobacco companies manage to develop truly safer cigarettes. The libs are going to have complete breakdowns in twenty years or so when teenagers start taking up smoking again in droves because most of the risks have been eliminated, and the public starts demanding to be allowed to smoke in public again.
/hyperbole