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

Almost everything can be toxic. Poison is often the dose not the substance. You get many if not all of the same chemicals sitting around camp fire. Difference is that most people only sit around a camp fire for a few hours at a time now and then. Not 5-6 times a day almost every day for decades.

Cigarettes are bad for you cause constantly crop dusting your lungs with particulate matter in the form of smoke or dust is bad for you.

This is why coal miners get sick. This is why wood workers get sick if they don’t wear masks or use their chemicals in a well ventilated area. This is why people who work at foundries get sick. This is why people who just naturally live in dusty areas get sick. Hell people from before the advent of modern lighting were more susceptible to lung related illness cause of spending so much time around their indoor fireplace, candles, kerosene lamps, etc.

Literally any scenario that has you routinely inhaling dust or smoke for hours a day most days for years on end, its going to have a high risk of causing cancer or some other pulmonary illness.

The problem with cigarettes is far more to do with their addictive nature and frequency of consumption more so than what is actually in them. Now it’s true that technically there is no “safe” level of inhaling any kind of smoke. Even smoking a little does technically increase your risk, but the risk of only a little occasional smoking is negligible against the background noise of just living in the world and breathing the air most of us do. The real harm comes from addiction and frequency. Constantly dusting your lungs. That’s the danger.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I smoke like 7-10 weed joints a day minimum, am I doing the same potential lung cancer damage as smoking the same amount of cigarettes?

Anonymous 0 Comments

They key point here is that most of the toxins in cigarettes are created while smoking because the combustion is incomplete. So there is a mess of unoxidized stuff – some highly reactive – in the smoke. If combustion went to completion – the nicotine would burn along with all other compounds and you be breathing some CO2 in nitrogen. 

No one adds formaldehyde to cigarettes, it gets created. 

Anonymous 0 Comments

One of the things that are added into cigarettes is micro-abrasives that cause tiny cuts in your lungs which accelerate the absorption of nicotine.

Another is a dye in the filter which turns yellow in the presence of heat, which subconsciously makes people think that bad stuff is getting filtered out and that it’s not as unhealthy as it could be

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s to stop it going mouldy because it’s sold damp. Also it adds weight… it’s sold by weight.

Tobacco plants also have a lot of stuff that causes other plants to become diseased. Don’t tend to your chilli plants after rolling a cigarette.

[Additive free tobaccos](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=additive+free+tobaccos&atb=v405-1&ia=web) have a lot less stuff in them. They are sold much less damp.