I know it's completely self-serving and seemingly at the mercy of the cognitive biases we humans tend to have(wishful thinking, the aforementioned self-serving bias, confirmation bias, etc), but I genuinely believe that the health risks of pipe smoking are minimal, and I would even express the much more controversial intuition(And this is nothing more than an intuition, take it with a grain of salt) that tobacco itself is not as harmful as the data suggests. My views are somewhat complicated, but the first red flag for me is that cancer is simply not a reliable outcome for smokers. Even cigarette smokers do not reliably get cancer. Countless non-smokers get cancer, and for cigarettes, how can we know it's not the paper, or the additives, or some variable that links cigarette smokers like a personality type or a genetic predisposition or stress? We simply don't have medical science that rigorous at this time to my knowledge. It's extremely, extremely difficult, to pin cancer on tobacco in a world full of various carcinogens and radiation(As a point of reference the various superpowers of the world have a history of detonating extremely radioactive, devastating weapons all over the globe, to test them). There's something fishy about the how taboo tobacco is in the west, and I think it's more likely that the way modern medical science views tobacco is poisoned by this taboo, than tobacco being precisely as harmful as it is claimed. Despite this, what data there is, seems to be very, very weak in showing a causal relationship between significant health risks and pipe smoking. We still have to answer why certain people(even large numbers) can go on living lives smoking massive amounts of pipes or cigars, for massive amounts of years, and die at a ripe old age. Why is this the case? I don't claim to know, but we can know that tobacco is not the instant death sentence that new scary warning label on your tin or pouch suggests. There's something fishy about it. There's something more.
Like I said, I know this view isn't a "good look", I know how it sounds: "Oh, you just believe that because you're a pipe smoker!" Well, I'd like to think not. I want to be in touch with reality, even if that reality goes against my own preferences and desires, I can confidently say that is a core value of mine. If tobacco really does cause poor health, I want to be the first to know and choose my behaviors carefully so I do not regret them, but it's just... honestly not a huge concern based on what I see before me.
