ELi5: Why do cigarettes have so many toxic substances in them? Surely you don’t need rat poison to get high?

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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

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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