This is why frying onions always attract a crowd ... when a food aroma comes from the kitchen, everybody in the house tends to gather there automatically, without being conscious of what brought them - 'I just need to rinse my hands,' or, 'I just need something from under the sink' ... (this is why cigarettes are wrapped in cellophane -- to preserve their aroma).

In addition to its appetite-inducing aroma, the tobacco plant contains a narcotic (nicotine) - a signal-cutting anaesthetic which, as soon as the cigarette smoke is inhaled, races the mouth-to-brain-signal and cuts it, numbing the mouth and digestive tract, and cutting the appetite which its own aroma aroused in the first place.

If the cigarette is stubbed out half-smoked, the wave of anaesthesia passes and on relighting the butt, the actual awful burnt-rubber taste of the burning tobacco reveals itself. But if the smoker perseveres, the rotten taste disappears again as local anaesthesia supervenes again!

Mimicry is universal among living creatures: its function in a predator is to render the mimic invisible. Cats are invisible to mice - their irregular patches of colour are a camouflage which breaks up their outline - otherwise no cat would ever catch a mouse. Tigers have striped coats which mimic the pattern of light and shade in the jungle, to enable them to creep up on their prey, unseen.

Similarly, tobacco mimics food, triggering the appetite with its aroma and then anaesthetising the digestive tract with its narcotic to quench the appetite again, mimicking the feeding cycle, but of course, without contributing any nourishment (or entertainment, other than anticipation or distraction: there is no actual 'nicotine experience'). Like a cuckoo laying its egg in another bird's nest, it battens on its host, who directly or indirectly propagates it and clears away its competitors.

Thus human beings who cannot distinguish tobacco from food are fooled into acting as the reproductive organs (or agents) of their enemy, the tobacco plant.

A crawling baby which comes upon a pack of cigarettes will break them up and push them into its mouth. The parent will then rush over and protect the cigarettes from the baby (instead of protecting the baby from the cigarettes!) rather in the way that in all too many households, puppies are cosseted, while the baby is punished (naughty! [smack]).

Thus tobacco is a central nervous system parasite, (as a tape worm is a parasite of the digestive tract or lice are skin parasites) with the function of propagating itself without alerting its host to its true nature: the insidious drip drip drip of anaesthetic nicotine into the nervous system keeps the host permanently off-balance and too distracted to recognise tobacco as foe not food.

Cancer is a bonus: narcotine suppresses the coughing urge, and paralyses the little moving hairs (cilia) which line the air-passages and shift the layer of mucous so as to eject debris and foreign matter from the lungs. Thus the poisonous tars remain to initiate the processes of cancer, heart disease, arterial sclerosis etc. etc.

In its unconscious, automatic, and highly successful efforts to control humans for its own benefit and propagation, the tobacco plant allies itself with other parasitic plants and yeasts whose aroma triggers appetite while their narcotics quench it: tea, and coffee also have attractive aromas and stupefying effects which mutually aid subversion of the human nervous system to their own benefit, obstructing detection and eradication of the parasites.

It is part of the propaganda of the allies of this deadly predator and despoiler of human lives (its servants and promoters, 'the' government and their puppet-masters the treacherous narcotics pushers of the international tobacco corporations who own the information sources and the political parties) that cancer is an occasional unfortunate side-effect: in truth it is the virtually universal fate of moderate, light and even passive smokees.