Not just rat poison, but so many of the ingredients just sound straight up unnecessary and also harmful. Why is there tar in cigarettes? Or arsenic? Formaldehyde? I get the tobacco and nicotine part but do you really need 1001 poisons in it???
EDIT: Thanks for answering! I was also curious on why cocaine needs cement powder and gasoline added in production. Snorting cement powder does not sound like a good idea. Then again, snorting cocaine is generally not considered a good idea… but still, why is there cement and gasoline in cocaine??
In: Biology
Most of the bad shit in a cigarette is inherent to the incomplete burning process. “Smoke” is just a ton of different chemicals produced when plant material breaks down. You can’t possibly make a cigarette or blunt or even a campfire without these chemicals.
Cigarettes are a natural product made from plants. Plants are not particularly careful about what they absorb, so in addition to the tars and volatiles from burning (like formaldehyde or benzene) there are trace amounts of all sorts of elements. If arsenic is present in the soil, then it will be present in the tobacco.
> Why is there tar in cigarettes?
Because when you burn plant material you get tar. Tobacco is plant material, therefore there is tar in smoked cigarettes.
> Or arsenic?
The tobacco plant takes up arsenic naturally present in the soil, so when you burn it the arsenic is released as well. Most edible plants contain some amount of arsenic.
> Formaldehyde?
When you burn cellulose, sugars, etc. it can create formaldehyde. Burning plant matter is going to create a lot of substances, you would get formaldehyde from burning lettuce.
> …but so many of the ingredients just sound straight up unnecessary and also harmful.
That is 1000% the point. The people crowing about the ingredients are trying to convince you that smoking tobacco is horrible for you and so they tell you all about the scary ingredients in the smoke while not mentioning the fact that it is also in the smoke of any burning plant matter.
Smoking is of course bad for you. But the vast majority of the harmful ingredients that are cited the producers don’t add to the tobacco.
Cigarettes are no doubt bad for your health, but a lot of the “toxins” message is just from misleading anti-smoking campaigns. Many “toxic substances” are always found in low levels in plants, fruits, and vegetables; some are natural according to, and some come from the pesticides used. Some of the toxins in cigarettes are from the additives they use to preserve the tobacco.
Most of the toxins in tobacco are not added to the product – they are byproducts of the burning of the tobacco leaf. Case in point, formaldehyde is produced when additives such as sugars, sorbitol, guar gum, cellulose fibres, and carob and gum in tobacco are burnt.
Tobacco companies aren’t going out of their way to make cigarettes unhealthy – that would be bad business. They just can’t magically make breathing smoke a healthy thing to do.
No one is *intentionally* putting arsenic into cigarettes. But tobacco plants can absorb arsenic from the soil as they grow, much like rice, and the arsenic remains in the leaves as they are dried and ends up in the finished product. In its natural state it wouldn’t be a problem, but you’re consuming a relatively large amount of tobacco leaves since they’ve been dried and concentrated.
Tar is a confusing one, because the “tar” they are referring to is not the same as the “tar” you may be thinking of, its not the same stuff they put on roads and roofs. It’s just a generic term for the sticky residue left by sooty tobacco smoke that results from incomplete combustion of the material.
Formaldehyde is also not an intentional additive. But it’s important to remember than burning is both a physical and a chemical reaction. The chemical we call formaldehyde just happens to be the resultant that forms when certain compounds burn. Lots of things create formaldehyde, it’s also present in your cars exhaust. We just don’t usually directly inhale it unless you’re smoking tobacco.
Outside of some things added to increase nicotine absorption and make them more addictive, there’s not really anything intentionally added to cigarettes to make them more toxic. The people who invented them just didn’t realize how bad it is for you to suck down unfiltered, particulate-laden smoke.
Smoke is toxic. Burning things and intentionally inhaling the smoke is toxic.
It just so happens there isn’t a whole lot that we intentionally burn and inhale, so when there is one, it stands out as exceptionally dangerous. If there were *lots* of things that we burned and inhaled on a regular basis, they would *all* be toxic, and it would be a normal (but profoundly stupid) thing.
Most of the chemicals in a cigarette are just, the chemicals in the plant(mixture of) that was used to make it. Over the years the companies have definitely started adding things that aren’t “just” the tobacco plant, or have created blends of plants that ended up in more of these chemicals that they discovered were more effective.
If you roll your own, you can make cigarettes that are purely leaves, paper, and filter, and people do, but it doesn’t necessarily make a cigarette without any of these big bad chemicals.
They don’t intentionally add all of the bad shit in cigarettes. Some of it is just there and completely innocuous if you ignore the part where you light it on fire and inhale the smoke.
Smoking tobacco is so dangerous! I think I will stick to drinking poison instead. Not enough to kill me but just enough to have a good time. Because the bottled poison companies really care about us and they make sure that the poison that they sell is not poisonous enough to make me go blind or kill me right away. And the great thing with drinking poison is that you can mix it with fruit juice and put an umbrella in it so I look really cool while I drink the poison. But at least I’m not smoking those dangerous cancer causing cigarettes.
Most substances, if burnt, will show quantifiable amounts of dangerous chemicals. These substances are not added in the manufacturing process and are naturally present in the product.
Look up FSC cigarettes. They made cigarettes not burn so easily so that people wouldn’t fall asleep and kill themselves and others.
They even say they use bands instead of chemicals to slow down the burn but they are not fooling anyone.
A lot of the bad chemicals are in the filter and the paper.
A bunch of people saying that the companies don’t put chemicals in the product are very mislead.
As far as the tobacco itself, companies do add chemicals (ammonia) to better absorb nicotine and flavor additives which can form cancer causing chemicals when burned.
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