Hitch’s Drinking, Ctd

I wrote what killed Hitch "was not the alcohol as such or the many years of smoking, but the force of will that simply didn’t rest, and seemed to punish his body with ludicrously brutal days and nights of sleepless drive." Keith Humphreys counters:

Hitchens’ prided himself on his honesty and his courage, so let’s honor his memory by facing up to the fact that his addictions to alcohol and tobacco are almost certainly why his life ended well before his time. The National Institutes of Health estimates that about 75% of esophageal cancers are caused by chronic heavy drinking. For people who are also addicted to tobacco (as Hitchens was) risk of this form of cancer is even higher than that grim statistic suggests.