It's a lot for sure. Huge number. It's just kind of less than you would have thought. And keep in mind that the category of "smokers" has both those who smoke a pack a week and those who smoke 5 packs per day.

Even if you smoke a pack a day for 20 years, your risk of getting lung cancer - while way higher than someone who has never smoked, is still surprisingly low in an absolute sense. I would have thought it'd be like 80% or something. Not the case. It turns out that as far as smokers go, a pack a day is "light."

All of the other health effects, however, are honestly a much more compelling reason to quit. It's easy to brush off an elevated but still unlikely death by cancer. But it's not like you're fine and then you just up and die one day when you're 85. That honestly wouldn't be so bad at all. Much more common is that you'll live much of your life with weird chest pains, coughing every morning, getting out of breath going on walks, etc. Planning your life around smoke breaks and not smelling like smoke before going to the office or on a date, keeping your car/house from smelling like smoke, etc. Your QOL goes way down long before you get cancer - if you ever even do.

That was what motivated me to quit smoking when I was 26. And uh...again when I was 32 (though I quit for 2 years in the middle). I could feel that I was a smoker, and that was scary. You're not supposed to feel sick when you take a deep breath.

Statistics are great fun!

About 20% of the lung cancer deaths in the USA are non-smokers, or ~7000 people a year.

While lots of people know about smoking=cancer, most don't know about smoking=COPD or heart disease. Cancer sure is up there as the scariest, but it's not the thing that will probably kill you.

Crudely, very roughly taking those numbers: smokers are ONLY 4X more likely to die from lung cancer than general population. That's, surprisingly not that much higher. There are way riskier activities such as SCUBA diving or living near a busy road.

It is a lot, yes. But they still have a bit of a point. In absolute terms lung cancer isn't hugely common in smokers. About 1 in 10. So you're still somewhat unlikely to get lung cancer as a smoker. Although you're massively more likely to get it compared with someone who has never smoked. So it's a huge relative risk but a somewhat low absolute risk. As an individual even if you smoke the odds are still in your favour wrt lung cancer. Of course, with smoking there is a bunch of other things that can kill you before you get the chance to win the prize of lung cancer. So that has to be considered too.