Question: When a smoker's life goes up in smoke, at what rate does this occur? Can you estimate the longevity price of a single pack or even a single cigarette?

Answer: What follows are average figures, since some smokers get lucky enough to beat the odds. Smoking kills primarily through cancer and heart disease, both late-onset diseases starting at age 50 or so, say Lawrence Weinstein and John A. Adam in "Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin." Since life expectancy is less than 80, the average unlucky smoker will lose less than 30 years of life but more than 1 year (otherwise there wouldn't be such a fuss made about smoking). Taking the geometric mean of 1 and 30, smokers die an estimated 5 years earlier than nonsmokers.

If a person starts smoking at age 18 and dies at age 70, averaging a pack per day, that's about 400,000 cigarettes. Making the totally unverifiable but instructive assumption that each cigarette contributes equally to mortality, then each one will cost the smoker 5 years/400,000 =3D .00001 year =3D 5 minutes, or about the time it takes to smoke it. This rough calculation is borne out by a study in the "British Medical Journal" that found a 6.5 year life-expectancy loss (for less than one pack a day) and concluded each cigarette costs an average 11 minutes of life.

---

Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com