Re: Does anyone else here smoke? - to invincible

Hi Invincible,

Wow, that was an interesting posting. You don't have the health effects that other people have from smoking - but you also don't smoke the same stuff as they do! So, I'm wondering what the connection is here - cigarette companies put all sorts of sh** in their cigarettes. Plus, when people smoke filtered cigarettes ala the commercially produced kind, they're also inhaling whatever the filter is made up of (which turns out to be 95% plastic!). My guess is that you've missed the rotten effects that everyone else has, by rolling your own.

I did a web search for 'chemical additives to cigarettes.' Here's some of what you're missing:

There are 599 chemicals approved as additives in cigarettes.

95% of cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate (a plastic), and the balance are made from papers and rayon. From 1952 to 1957, cigarette filters included asbestos.

According to a publication written for the tobacco industry, additives can constitute ten percent of the weight of the "tobacco" portion of a cigarette, and four per cent of the entire cigarette.

When smoked, the tobacco and additives in a cigarette undergo complex chemical processes to form smoke that contains more than 4000 chemicals, including carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, nicotine, ammonia, arsenic and vinyl chloride (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1989). Forty-three constituents of tobacco smoke are known carcinogens including nitrosamines, quinoline, benzpyrene, cadmium, ammonia, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and hydrogen sulfide (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1989, and other sources).

RJR recognises it is in the drug business
"In a sense, the tobacco industry may be thought of as being a specialised, highly ritualised, and stylised segment of the pharmaceutical industry."3 (RJR 1972)

Philip Morris explains...
"The cigarette should be conceived not as a product but as a package. The product is nicotine. Think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a day's supply of nicotine.... Think of the cigarette as the dispenser for a dose unit of nicotine..... Smoke is beyond question the most optimised vehicle of nicotine and the cigarette the most optimised dispenser of smoke."2 (Philip Morris 1972)

"The results show that ammonia treatment caused a general increase in the delivery of bases including a 29% increase in nicotine

"Acetaldehyde is produced by the burning of sugars (the most common tobacco additives). "Overall, the effects of acetaldehyde on EEGs were similar to those of nicotine."

"Widely used as an additive, cocoa contains alkaloids, which may modify the effects of nicotine and have a pharmacological effect in themselves."

"Additives may be flavour enhancers or flavour suppressers."

"The limited regulation of tobacco additives has tended to concentrate on the toxicity of the additive itself. This has tended to draw upon food regulation -- however, it is quite likely that the toxicity of an additive when ingested as food may differ from its effect when inhaled in smoke."

Anyway, I thought the whole question you raised by avoiding the rotten health effects of cigarettes was pretty interesting.

As usual companies will poison people to make a buck. And as usual its legal to do the poisoning.

Lisa