The Danger of Smoking. It's hard to find good information on how much smoking increases a person's risk of death. Actuarial tables, it seems, say that male smokers die about 7 years before non-smokers, and I think that controlled for weight, but it didn't control for most of the reasons people who choose to smoke die earlier than people who do not. An hour's Web search leaves me highly dissatisfied with the research done. I don't think medical researchers think of controlling for ethnicity, education, and income, for example. It would also be a good idea to take any study and see if its methodology would also predict, for example, that smoking causes an increase in car accidents or in criminality. I bet all methodologies would, and the only question is the extent of it.