Society Quit Smoking and Lung Cancer Fell

I was wondering the other day when we might see the returns to life expectancy from the absence of smoking. SlateStarCodex read my mind in his recent post, Cancer Progress; much more than you wanted to know.

Of course the rise and decline of the red line (lung and bronchus cancer death rate) is the 30 year delayed effect of the the rise and fall of tobacco use.

This is both good news and a great example of how society can make a full u-turn in response to evidence. In theory, we should expect the returns to continued decline in smoking rates to yield an even lower lung cancer rate.

But how much do you want to bet that when the rate of lung cancer falls below that of prostate cancer, headlines will read, "prostate cancer becomes biggest killer, overtaking lung cancer"?

But of course, the real story should be everything is awesome nobody is happy.