The 1950's saw a big rise in lung cancer cases which required answers. . Around this time we also saw a huge uptake of tobacco smoking, nuclear testing, industrial pollution, and diesel engine usage.
Tobacco became the patsy.

"by 1954 the team had published a paper confirming the link."

The studies of Doll and Hill confirmed nothing and only provided more questions than answers...eg...their studies showed that lung cancer was more prevalent amongst those who didn't inhale as opposed to those that did! Could it be that smoking actually had a protective effect?

It may sound far-fetched (after years of propaganda and scaremongering by the anti-tobacco INDUSTRY), but just look at the figures today. Current smokers account for only 20% of new cases of lung cancer. 80% are non smokers of which 60% are ex-smokers. The vast majority of people today who get lung cancer are those who have quit smoking.

To put it another way....
Roughly 4/5 people in the UK today are non-smokers.
Roughly 4/5 cases of lung cancers in the UK are people who don't smoke.

...And not only bacon! I particularly like this quote by Robert Nilsson,
Professor of Molecular Toxicology, Stockholm University, Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Toxicology.

"Looked at another way, a child’s intake of benzo[a]pyrene during 10 hours from second hand smoke is estimated to be about 250 times less than the amount ingested from eating one grilled sausage."

From Bayer & Stuber

“…..In the last half century the cigarette has been transformed. The fragrant has become foul. . . . An emblem of attraction has become repulsive. A mark of sociability has become deviant. A public behavior is now virtually private. Not only has the meaning of the cigarette been transformed but even more the meaning of the smoker [who] has become a pariah . . . the object of scorn and hostility.”

This change from fragrant to foul has not come from the smoke which has remained a constant. The shift is an entirely psychological one. Unfortunately, the way the shift is manufactured is through negative conditioning. The constant play on fear and hatred through inflammatory propaganda warps perception. Ambient tobacco smoke was essentially a background phenomenon. Now exposure to tobacco smoke (SHS) has been fraudulently manufactured into something on a par with a bio-weapon like, say, sarin gas. There are now quite a few who screech that they “can’t stand” the “stench” of smoke, or the smoke is “overwhelming”; there are now those, hand cupped over mouth, that attempt to avoid even a whiff of dilute remnants of smoke – even outdoors. There are those that claim that, arriving from a night out, they had to put all of their clothes in the washing machine and scrape the “smoke” off their skin in the shower. There are even those that claim they are “allergic” to tobacco smoke. Yet there are no allergens (proteins) in tobacco smoke to be allergic to.

And it didn’t stop with just the smoke. Cigarette butts – heretofore unheard of – suddenly became a “monumental problem” too – akin to improvised explosive devices, requiring drastic action. These are all recent phenomena born of toxic propaganda; it is an expanding hysteria. It says nothing about the physical properties/propensities of tobacco smoke. These people are demonstrating that they have been successfully conditioned (brainwashed) into aversion. They are now suffering mental dysfunction such as anxiety disorder, hypochondria, or somatization. Typical symptoms of anxiety disorder are heart palpitations, chest tightness, shortness of breath, headache, dizziness, etc. These capnophobics (smokephobics) are no different to those irrationally attempting to avoid cracks in the pavement lest their mental world come crashing down. Questionable social engineering requires putting many into mental disorder to advance the ideological/financial agenda. It's the antismoking fanatics/zealots/extremists and their toxic mentality and propaganda that have long been in need of urgent scrutiny.

In 2008 the Dutch government looked into the cost of treating people from the age of 20 to death. They had three categories, the healthy, obese and smokers. The results were not what the health gurus were looking for.

The lifetime costs were in Euros:

Healthy: 281,000

Obese: 250,000

Smokers: 220,000

It really is quite dishonest of the anti smokers to say that smoking is a burden on society.

Well George...whilst your drink is on the table in front of you, it is releasing carcinogenic toxins into the air (in far greater amounts than SHS) to be inhaled by everyone else in the room. Maybe YOU should go stand outside with the smokers! After all, fairs fair.

The most important regulatory obstacle for many pubs in recent years has been the smoking ban which, unlike that of most other countries, allows no exemptions whatsoever for the hospitality industry. The UK’s draconian smoking bans correlate more closely with the collapse in pub numbers than any other factor and it is now widely acknowledged that the ban has damaged many pubs. 4 pubs per week were closing before the 2007 ban. Immediately following the ban this figure rose dramatically. The peak in pub closures came in 2009, with 52 pubs shutting down each week...and are still closing at a rate of 31 a week now.
according to the Campaign for Real Ale

TotalitarianAlex...Pubs, clubs, restaurants and bingo halls are not public places They are private businesses and as such, any rules should be down to the owner of said establishments.

...you mean like alcohol and diesel fumes?

'No positive benefits'...You sure about that?. Just because the main stream media won't say anything positive about tobacco because it aint PC, doesn't mean that smoking has no benefits...Here's a few for starters.

Smoking lowers risk of ulcerative colitis http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20143...

Smoking lowers risk of skin cancer http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/...

Smoking lowers risk of Thyroid Cancer http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11000579

Smoking lowers risk of breast cancer http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/1998/pr125....

Smoking lowers risk of Alzheimers http://www.forces.org/evidence/carol/carol16.htm

Smoking lowers risk of Gout http://www.renalandurologynews.com/news-in-brief/...

Smoking during pregnancy reduces the risk of preeclampsia (one of the leading causes of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity worldwide) by up to 50% http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17127256?dopt=...

Smoking lowers your risk of joint replacement surgery http://douglassreport.com/2011/07/31/lifelong-tob...

Smoking lowers risk of Parkinson's disease. Smoking lowers risk of obesity. Smoking lowers risk of death after some heart attacks. Smoking helps the heart drug clopidogrel work better. Smoking lowers risk of knee-replacement surgery. http://www.livescience.com/15115-5-health-benefit...

Smoking increases work capacity http://dengulenegl.dk/English/Nicotine.html

Children of mothers who smoke at least 15 cigarettes a day tend to have lower odds for suffering from allergic rhino-conjunctivitis, allergic asthma, atopic eczema and food allergy, compared to children of mothers who had never smoked. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11422156

P.S Did you know that the only two people to get to blow out 120 candles on their birthday cakes were both lifelong smokers?

The evidence of serious harm from smoking is actually rather tenuous. There have been thousands of published papers, of which I’ve read a substantial proportion, that claim harm. All these papers rely on correlations derived from observational studies. Empirical scientific studies do not support them. For example, toxicological and intervention studies.

If there really was strong evidence then tobacco companies would have been sued out of existence decades ago, as happened with asbestos companies. Look up the McTear vs ITL court case for instance, where the top tobacco control ‘experts’ had to produce evidence in court and singularly failed.