What increases ones chance of getting cancer and other respiratory complications? Is it just smoking anything e.g. normal paper, crack, weed, etc.? Or is it specifically smoking cigarette ingredients? If someone smoked anything else other than cigarettes, as much as cigarette smokers smoke cigarettes, would their likelihood to getting cancer be the same as that of a cigarette smoker?
In: Biology
It’s mostly the byproducts of the curing process – tobacco isn’t all that bad in its natural state, but when it’s cured, especially in anaerobic conditions, the microbes naturally present and digesting it create some pretty toxic and/or carcinogenic compounds as waste byproducts. Then when you smoke the cured tobacco, you’re inhaling all that stuff.
The nicotine is bad mainly because it makes you so very very addicted to inhaling all those toxins so frequently.
The tar is bad mainly because it gums up your body’s natural defenses against inhaled junk and makes the bad stuff stick in there. It does also plug up the smaller bits of your airways, but your body’s natural defenses would clear it out after awhile if the nicotine addiction didn’t cause you to keep constantly sucking more tar in faster than it clears out.
Smoking other stuff has its own problems. As with cigarettes, you’re not smoking just one single substance, but a combination of many which may team up to work together against you. And there may not be one bad thing – taken alone, even if each constituent might not be particularly dangerous, working together the combination can wreck you.
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