Smoking Kills
The Legend:
Everyone knows smoking will turn your lungs into blackened death jerky, but a painful demise via cancer isn't enough to dissuade some people from lighting up, so there are quite a few tales of smoking ending people's lives in, shall we say, more direct ways.
The Truth:
A passenger on the London Underground was really craving a smoke, but was apparently too much of a law-abiding citizen to dare lighting up in a no-smoking car. Ah, but what about the space in-between the cars? They can't stop you from smoking there! What a bloody brilliant loophole!
Note the door on the end doesn't have a big "DON'T OPEN THIS WHEN THE TRAIN IS MOVING" sign on it, because most people know not to do that shit.
So, the guy forced open a door, squeezed into the space in-between his subway car and the next and lit up, but before he could inhale that first puff of sweet nicotine, he fell on the tracks and the train tore him apart like a prisoner fresh out of the hole ripping into a pack of Marlboros.
A London Underground worked laid out the lesson to be learned here in stark terms, "He was decapitated. This shows just how dangerous messing around between the carriages is. If this guy had waited ten minutes he’d still have been with us now."
Alternate lesson -- just do your drug of choice on the train like everybody else.
If the train's good enough for Santa, it's good enough for you.
Ah, but we're not yet finished making you feel bad about your dirty, dirty habit smokers. We have another story of cigarette-sparked carnage for you!
As Jenny Mitchell drove home, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide she used in her job as a hairdresser was slowly leaking onto the floor of her car. Of course most of us think of hydrogen peroxide as a harmless substance used to bleach hair and disinfect boo-boos, but it can be flammable or even explosive under the right (or more accurately, horribly wrong) circumstances. Nobody knows for sure exactly what kind of strange chemical reaction happened on the floor mats of Jenny's car, but as soon as she lit a cigarette her Mini Cooper was turned into a flaming Mini Casket.
A Mini Cooper explosion really is the cutest way to burn to death.
We'd suggest "SURGEON'S GENERAL WARNING: Smoking may cause you to be gruesomely decapitated or die in a ball of fire" be added to cigarette packages, but let's be honest, it might actually make more kids want to smoke.
For those who didn't arrive her via Cracked, you can read the rest of this year's Urban Legends article right here.