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Apparently a large amount of produced liquorice goes to flavor cigarettes, up to 4% of the weight of a cigarette's tobacco blend is liquorice[0]. So I would wager that smoking liquorice has killed more people than eating it (not that that tidbit of info helps in the case of the man in the article).

[0] https://www.dkfz.de/de/tabakkontrolle/download/PITOC/PITOC_T...

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I don't think it's the licorice that will kill you if you smoke 50 packs a day.

That would be a cigarette every 1.4 minutes, for the entire 24 hours, by the way :)

50 packs a month may be what they meant (about the average for chain smokers at more than 1 pack per day.) Or they did imply hyperbole.

Almost certainly hyperbole, but imagining 50 packs a day made me run the numbers for a laugh.

On one hand, you can compress that to once per minute and get a reasonable amount of sleep. A quick and guilt-inducing search informs me that one Matthew Tybor smoked a cigarette in a mere 36.44 seconds, so I guess that's plausible if we ignore the carbon monoxide?

On the other hand, nicotine is a stimulant, so maybe you wouldn't need to?

Let me put it this way - based on the article I cited, removing licorice from cigarettes would probably result in a measurable drop in addiction and cancer rates (perhaps single digit %, but still measureable).

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