[Burkean]

Though she did not smoke, much discussion has centered around her pre-marriage career as a cabaret singer in small, crowded, unventilated rooms full of smokers.

[Publius6961]

LOL!
Another MENSA candidate.

Not all smokers get cancer. The maximum figure is around 25%.
Second hand smoke in a killer only anectodally. All Scientific studies indicate otherwise.
Not all lung cancer victims are smokers.

Every human being, if they live long enough, will die of some form of cancer.

[Labyrinthos]

Though she did not smoke, much discussion has centered around her pre-marriage career as a cabaret singer in small, crowded, unventilated rooms full of smokers.

Perhaps. But where had she lived during her life? Radon gas has been linked to lung cancer. So has asbestos. And so has air pollution, in general. I'm sure there are statistical links to lots of possibilities, including Presidient Bush, global warming, and SUV's. But I'm not about to assume second hand smoke was the cause.

[jdm]

If you're a smoker who quits, then doesn't smoke for "x" number of years, and doesn't get cancer, your lungs gradually become like new again. I think it takes around 10 years for the lungs to become like new again.

This is a mystery to me. If she did cabaret, that was probably back in the 70s, 80s, maybe early 90s. The most recent of those was at least a decade ago.

[Smokin' Joe]

Something seldom discussed is that many people who live in large urban areas breathe far more crap than a smoker in a rural area: it is in the urban air. NO cigarette smoke required.

Just the tons of asbestos worn out of brake shoes/pads over the years, not to mention hammered out of buildings might have a wee effect. Other chemicals and toxins abound in an area where humans have lived in large numbers for decades or even centuries.

Of course, it is far easier to blame having seen someone smoke a cigarette, or having smelled on once, than do some decent medical research into real occupational or other hazards. That would require historical, engineering, chemical and other research, and extensive knowledge of those icky dirty "blue collar" things most exhalted physicians would never consider messing with, and in an historical contest to boot. The horror.

When I go, if of lung cancer, the cigs will probably get the blame. Not the creosote fumes from building seawalls, not the granodiorite dust from drilling shot holes in the Blue Ridge, nor the welding smoke from working in a steel fabrication plant. Not the fumes from oil-based drilling mud or crude oil, the years of grey skies in summer while the Clintons burned off hundreds of thousands of acres of National Forest (yes, the smoke made it here, and quite noticeably), not the dust of the farm fields carrying the residuals from nuclear tests in the 50's or pesticides or herbicides.

Nope, gotta be the smokes.

Besides cigarettes are obvious, cigarettes are "stinky", and they come in bright colored easy to blame packages. They are even put out by one of the eeeevil "Big"s......yadda, yadda, yadda....