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“If you never buy cigarettes yourself, and only bum them off friends, you are 62 per cent less likely to suffer lung cancer and 45 per cent less likely to require an operation to have your tongue removed after a throat cancer scare,” said Dr Ingrid Hellicot of the University of Queensland, who led the landmark study.
Social smokers could also protect themselves by only smoking when drunk, which also didn’t count, the study shows.
It was for this reason that alcoholics who also smoked suffered lower mortality rates than non-alcoholic smokers, said Theo Perkins of the Alcohol and Tobacco Information Office.
“That’s because alcoholics are more likely to smoke late at night at the pub after a few drinks, when it doesn’t count because you didn’t mean it to happen and wished you hadn’t in the morning,” Mr Perkins said.
The same principle applied to married, heterosexual men who had sex with other men in the basement of the Carslaw Building at the University of Sydney, and other notorious beats.
“There is no way they can get AIDS because they are not dirty fags, they are just normal Aussie blokes who happen to be having unprotected sex with men they consider dirty fags,” he said.