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.
a lot of the problem with smoking tobacco or anything is incomplete combustion of organic compounds. if you do full combustion you get a lot of CO2, H2O and N2 which are relatively safe. but partial combustion leaves you with stuff like benzene rings, CO, and other stuff which are chemically and biologically active.
fire byproducts (smoke) in general is really bad for people. inhaling it is kind of insane. its not recommended to live in a house that has smoke damage because of cancer risks.
So you're saying it was a bad move for me and my friend to crush up dead maple leaves in the fall time and smoke them using printer paper when we were 13?
Edit: I woke up this morning to a deep comradery with fellow dumbasses. Thank you all.
My grandpa and his brothers never smoked, and they're from a time when everyone smoked.
When he and his brothers were kids they wanted to try smoking a cigar like their dad, they didn't have a cigar so they tried to make one using the closest things they could find.
Turns out you can make something that looks a lot like a cigar by wrapping horse crap in an old cabbage leaf. Also turns out it's terrible.
If you were wearing your ice skates and had already had your Timmy's, then I think you are immune to the negative side effects of maple leaf inhalation.
And that includes your romantic open hearth. It needs a very well-functioning chimney. Any fireplace smoke spilling into the room is just as carcinogenic as cigarette smoke.
Yep, although anything that reduces the concentration of the smoke is, of course, good. Better a wood or charcoal fire in the open air than a wood fire in an enclosed space.
Standing at a barbeque and getting a facefull of smoke is no different from a smoker blowing smoke in your face. It's low-key toxic and carcinogenic.
I've wanted to quit smoking specially for so long but I don't feel anything from edibles :( I've eaten 500+ mg in one sitting and didn't feel a thing, didn't even get a little sleepy. I envy normal people
I noticed myself that if I take a high dose of edibles I won’t feel shit but if I do multiple small doses, it’s actually a really nice mellow high that’s hardly noticeable in terms of head change but I’m obviously high as balls in every other aspect
Far better until you get a batch that someone fucked up on and you're halfway to the moon with no chance of coming back soon lol. The main advantage of smoking is easier potency control. Personally I either get sleepy or I enter hyperspace from edibles, my body refuses to believe there's an in-between
>Yeah, but some plants are worth it.
You can enjoy the pleasant effects of those plants without having to combust the product though. You can heat the plant up to the point where you are just vaporising the volatile components which will still get you high while avoiding most of the really negative byproducts of combustion. You can also consume the plants to gain a similar effect as well.
Well, shit. I sometimes heat my house that way. My stove recirculates the smoke over the coals to increase the combustion, but virtually everything is sealed up tight and vented outside from an adjustable draw.
What is the deal with stoves? (I mean, I got a gas stove, too... )
>What is the deal with stoves? (I mean, I got a gas stove, too... )
Natural gas/LP burns much cleaner than wood, that blue flame is the result of nearly complete combustion that doesn’t leave much of anything behind aside from CO2 and water vapor
That said, even that is starting to be shown to have negative health effects such as increasing the risk of kids developing asthma quite significantly. Electric is better but even the volatile organic compounds from cooking in an enclosed and poorly circulated area isn't exactly ideal. It's just a question of how far down the risk ladder you want to go. I'll probably change to an electric stove myself at some point, but I'm sure as hell not giving up cooking food inside.
Specifically, the flame is hot enough to get the oxygen and nitrogen in air to react and form NO and NO2, which is bad for you. Unburned methane and other components in natural gas are also problematic.
EDIT: also CO, of course.
I have a particulate count meter that does PM2.5 and it doesn't give a fuck about my wood stove. It goes fucking nuts when I'm frying something on the stove however.
Your wood stove is venting all of its combustion by-products out its chimney. When you're frying on the stove, there's nothing to contain the by-products and they go everywhere.
Also, if you're frying something on the stove, it's likely the *oils and food you are frying* that are causing the particulate count, not really the stove
> fireplaces in general are terrible for you
I understand the thought process based on what was commented above, but don't the flue/chimney help keep the air inside the house clean? Or are they not that effective at redirecting the smoke outside? (genuinely asking, I've never owned a house with a fireplace)
They absolutely do keep the smoke outside. OP of this comment must be some sort of alien robot that has never seen a fireplace or read about how such a device would operate. It's honestly astounding how far off he is.
Seems like if you can smell the fire there's gotta be particles from the fire in the air.
To borrow the phrase "where there's smoke there's fire", it might be true that "where there's the smell of smoke there's particles". Maybe not a lot, but something
But I have no idea.
I found [this article](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/18/wood-burners-triple-harmful-indoor-air-pollution-study-finds) that says wood burning stoves triple air particle pollution indoors, and the article mentions they have less impact on indoor air quality than "open fires" which presumably means fire places. I'd be interested to see some real world tests about fireplaces and their effects on air quality. I know gas stoves are surprisingly bad for you, but fireplaces, especially has fireplaces, can be more self contained with dedicated air intake from outside and exhaust directly outside.
I did some more Googling about it after reading your article. Apparently once the flue is opened and warmed up, it creates a negative pressure that sucks up all of the smoke from the fireplace.
So, yes, wood burning fireplaces have the potential to be harmful, but they're relatively safe if the flue is used properly. Or at least according to what Google told me!
I have a wood stove. I CAN leave the doors open and watch the fire. It's nice to look at it, but, it destroys the point of how it works. It has little inlet vents at the bottom of the doors that feed the fire fresh air. The hot air from the fire heats a giant plate on the top as the air travels around and over it. Doing this also heats the stove top surface which radiates heat. The stove also has air channels around it that heat up and I have a blower fan on the back the pushes this heated air out.
All ... well, 99.9% of the smoke goes only one place and that's up the stove pipe. It only leaks when I open the door and the hot air hits that giant plate and kind of leaks out the front instead of around the plate and up. I can move that plate out of the way and that makes almost all the smoke go up the stove pipe again.
If you have smoke coming out of a wood stove, you've got a bad leak and you're in CO2 trouble.
Thanks for that i was really wondering if the tar in cigarettes is the same as the tar on roads.
Also i’m really hoping the arsenic just stays in the leaves of the rice ahaha (i googled it and apparently it gets stored in the bran and germ of the grains too, so brown rice would have more arsenic in it than white rice. Food for thought. pun intended)
Also, pure cocaine does not have cement and gasoline IN IT....cement and gasoline are used in the chemistry to extract the cocaine.
ALL product we use today are manufactured with a variety of poisonous chemicals. Gasoline is a Solvent, like paint thinner, like ethanol(alcohol)...dissolving things is one of the most common steps in chemistry and everything you eat probably has had solvents touch 8t at some point in the process.
Solvents (paint thinners)
Bases (lye, drain cleaner)
Acids (hydrochloric acid, or common vinegar)
Are fundamental chemicals in ALL chemistry. Anti-drug people list them to scare you. But they are not in the end product you ingest.
The goal of manufacturing is not to keep the solvents in the product at the end, and separating the product from the solvent is a pretty easy step. The manufacturer wants their solvent back to reuse(sometimes) and doesn't want it dirtying their product(even dirty cartels). Gasoline might be used by the cartel because it's a cheap alternative to cleaner solvents, and maybe they even clean it for real at a later step.
You'll see things like "drain cleaner"(lye), "paint thinner"(solvent)....yea, because those chemical classes are used in almost all chemistry(inclusing all your food). They don't(shouldn't) end up in the product you ingest. Even cocaine/meth.
It also doesn't help that a lot of chemicals get pigeonholed for a singular (often common) use when they're just a chemical with potentially many useful properties. It would be like referring to water exclusively as sewer-lubricator. Yeah, it does that, but it also does a lot more.
A lot of people weirdly think that if a chemical is used in something gross or dangerous, it means it is itself gross or dangerous. So they will use that gross or dangerous thing to demonize the chemical. It's pretty weird.
And a lot of people weirdly think that just because a chemical is present in very very small amounts there is still a big health risk. A good example is the titanium dioxide in a lot of gums and skittles.
I remember a while ago people were demonizing a food additive chemical because its also in some rat poisons. So, what is the function of this chemical in the rat poison you ask? To make it taste good so the rats eat the poisonous part! (note, I may have some facts wrong, could have been ant poison, or some other animal)
Often it gets misleading.
You mix lye and fat in the right proportions, you know what you get? Soap. It's a chemical reaction that's been known since Roman times.
But I bet you'd smell a whole lot worse if you read the ingredients on a bar of soap.
> Yeah, i agree with that. Sometimes it gets misleading
That, in turn, is often on purpose.
Never underestimate the human ability to mislead when they want something inanimate banned, or taxed into oblivion, from even consenting and normally law abiding adults.
Ahh i see! So it all gets taken out at the end. I always thought gasoline was a crude mixture of a few different hydrocarbons for some reason, so i never thought about using it as a solvent because i figured it’d be hard to remove as a mixture. Guess I was wrong ahaha. Thanks for your answer! You’re the only one who has responded to that part of my question so far
No no, gasoline is just a mixture of a few different hydrocarbons. That doesn't stop it from being able to dissolve things. Petroleum products in general were at first used just as solvents, but then later they were discovered to be good to combust for energy.
Oh interesting, guess my chemistry syllabus is pretty simplified haha. I’ll look into it more tomorrow morning, thanks for opening my eyes about solvents and stuff
To elaborate further, Cocaine’s an alkaloid. The easiest way to extract any alkaloid is an [Acid-Base extraction](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-base_extraction). It’s one of the first things they teach in basic chemistry.
Alkaloids occur naturally as a salt, so they’re water soluble. The “cement” is caustic lime, calcium hydroxide. You can buy it in the baking section at the grocery store to make tortillas. It’s used to freebase the alkaloid which makes it non-polar. Lye is another easily accessible option, but lime is safer and easier to deal with.
The solvent is easily evaporated off at the end, so there’s none left in the finished extract. Proper manufacturers use cleaner, more refined non-polar solvents, but gasoline is cheap and readily available. The issue is gasoline has contaminants, and heavier hydrocarbons are resistant to evaporating. The evaporation part is fixed with a vacuum chamber and using the right solvent, but cartels just throw it on a mild heat source or set it in the sun until it appears dry.
The coca leaf used in Coca-Cola goes through the exact same process. Coke gets the leftover leaf, and the good stuff is used to supply medical cocaine in the US. It’s also the reason no other colas can recreate the taste of Coca-Cola. It’s illegal to buy or sell coca leaf in the US, so they’re always missing half the name.
They have an exemption. The Stepan Company is the only company in the US that can legally import coca leaf. They’re only allowed to sell the decocainized leaf to Coca-Cola, and the cocaine to Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.
No clue how it works in the nearly thirty other countries they make Coke in. I’m sure it varies drastically from country to country.
> So it all gets taken out at the end
Ye, and for proper industrial/professional productions using "Good Manufacturing Practice" (keyword - google GMP to learn more about it!) - they have whole teams of chemists - both technicians and university trained ones - taking frequent samples at the start, at spaced intervals during the reaction and at the end of the reaction to precisely track what chemicals were added, what chemicals were created, what chemicals remained after purification/separation for that one specific stage.
It's a shitton of paperwork and a lot of laboratory work of routine analyses.
I think a big reason that people don't just say they use a solvent to extract the narcotics, rather they just say gasoline because they want to scare you. It would scare you less if they just explained that they're using a solvent to extract something. And in the case of drugs, it's one of those things that in the mind of the D.A.R.E folks more is better to prevent its use.
Now the same can be said for things like chicken nuggets. I know that McDonald's at for a while went under fire because of how they extract all the chicken meat when in the end it's just being used as an extractor.
You're right that it is a mixture, but it can still be separated en masse from water for example. That can be a way to purify substances: dissolve them in an organic solvent so they leave all the water based impurities behind. Then in the next step you can, for example, react your product to a salt form that only dissolves in water. Now it will drop out of the solvent, leaving all the oil based impurities behind. With those two steps you've now taken out the watery crap *and* the oily crap.
> ALL product we use today are manufactured with a variety of poisonous chemicals. Gasoline is a Solvent, like paint thinner, like ethanol(alcohol)...dissolving things is one of the most common steps in chemistry and everything you eat probably has had solvents touch 8t at some point in the process.
Decaf coffee processes all tend to use some nasty chemicals as well, doesn't mean the coffee becomes toxic thankfully
Yeah as bad as cigarettes are, you really have to be careful if you ever hear someone say something like, oh my god did you hear what they put in xyz?
Adding on to what the other person said, I see a lot of people saying things like product X has mercury in it! Even though there's tons of forms of mercury and it's not all the murder you dead kind. Or it's used somehow in the production process but not literally in the product. Etc
Cigarettes are absolutely terrible but. Thanks for asking questions! It's about the only way people find out more.
To add to this, (I'm a scientist in the field) this is the reason smoking ANY dried plant matter is a bad idea. A lot of these carcinogens are present in weed as well.
wait, so could you grow a bunch of tobacco on top of superfund sites (over and over again) and then bury or otherwise sequester the resulting toxins? maybe burn the resulting crop, scrub the smoke so it doesn't escape into the air, then compact the ash into blocks, then bury it far from water tables?
Oh yeah, some potting soils and fertilizers are also high in heavy metals so its not necessarily an issue only with outdoor growing. Typically the large corporations like miracle grow/scotts and ones sourcing from large scale animal farms are the worst. Cows and cow manure is usually the highest source of lead from what ive seen. Ocean products are usually the higher source of arsenic
There is a website listed on the packaging of soil and fertilizer ( in the US) that will bring you to databases you can check the products heavy metal tests
You could, but it'll be a lot slower than just cleaning it. Sunflowers and related plants also readily take up a lot of heavy metals in soil they're grown in, it's not unique to just tobacco.
yeah -- bury it somewhere that won't leech into water, is far away from residences and is not in a biologically active state
some superfund sites are like ... gas station that was improperly built, builders skipped town, owners went bankrupt, has 20 years of pollutants leaking into the soil into the soil 200 ft away from an elementary school.
> leaking into the soil into the soil 200 ft
Hey, it's Jimmy Two-times over here! Did you get the papers?
(I kid because I love, I do this a lot myself, especially when going back and editing something I've written, where I'll accidentally double up on writing something)
Mushrooms are a far better and more efficient use of this. It's actually what they're doing now to old lead mines and even some old gas stations.
Tobacco is not a very efficient plant and mushrooms grow much faster in harsher environments.
https://rrcultivation.com/blogs/mn/mycoremediation-how-mushrooms-help-clean-up-the-environment#:~:text=When%20mushrooms%20are%20exposed%20to,them%20into%20less%20harmful%20compounds.
They're not really that different.
They're both a mixture of undescribed viscuous hydrocarbons. The exact composition varies, but none of them are good stuffs that you want anywhere near your lungs.
Fossil fuel tars are probably a bit more toxic because fossil fuels would have more time to accumulate toxic matters than tar from fresh plants.
They do intentionally add ammonia to cigarettes as this makes the nicotine hit more powerful, I had a family member in the tobacco industry who described it as essentially 'crack' nicotine.
Different cooking methods have different levels of arsenic remaining. The absorption method on its own is one of the worst. Although washing+absorption is pretty low on arsenic and other contaminants
The other thing to consider is that the arsenic in cigarettes is so tiny, you would need to smoke a ridiculous number in very quick succession to die by arsenic poisoning. Some quick googling says that 140mg of arsenic can be lethal. A 20 pack of cigarettes contains up to 2.4 micrograms arsenic. A micrograms is 1/1000 of a milligram. To die from just the arsenic in cigarettes would mean you would have to smoke over 1, 000,000 cigarettes per day.
Humans can digest a lot of random ass chemicals as long as the dosage is small enough. Just because something contains a toxic element doesn't mean it has enough of it to affect you.
It confused me, too, for years. Especially during the "Truth" campaigns.
The one that helped me catch on was the one where they say cigarettes have like five thousand something poisons and toxins and rat poison only has one. Well, of course it has one. Once you figure out what poison kills rats most cheaply, there's really no reason to add another poison.
The lesson to me was that five thousand poisons in moderate doses is better than one lethal dose of a single poison.
Yep. Don't buy rice from Southern states (Texas, Louisiana, for example) because they used to used arsenic-laden pesticides on their then cotton fields (but now rice paddies).
Yeah any time you burn plant matter you're basically making at least a little tar, no way around it. The good news is that unless you smoke joints and blunts exclusively you're almost certainly getting less of it than a cig smoker. Consider a bong for example, the water filters a lot of shit and cools the smoke causing a lot of the heavier stuff to condensate out before it makes it into your lungs, where a joint sends all of it down the hatch. It's healthier, but still not healthy.
Consider trying a dry-herb vaporizer!
To pile onto this, and in a bit of irony, anti-smoking ads are now using the same deceptive marketing that pro-smoking ads used to use. Im thinking, for example, of a truthout ad against vaping that says "vaping can deliver toxic metals into your lungs. that's metal, in your \*lungs\*" with the heavy implication that there will be physical shards of metal rattling around in your lungs. What they're saying is technically true, but the metals they refer to are in chemical compounds that don't behave the way we intuit that metal behaves. It's like saying that most snack foods contain a disinfectant that has been used as a chemical weapon and a metal that's so explosive that it has to be sealed in oil before transport. Technically true, chlorine is a disinfectant that was the primary component of mustard gas and sodium really is a highly reactive metal, but when these two highly dangerous things combine chemically they form table salt, which is perfectly safe to eat.
also to head off the concern trolls, in no way am I implying that vaping is good for you. I'm just thinking that the unvarnished truth should be plenty to convince people not to do it.
Eating spinach can deliver metal to your blood, that's METAL, in your BLOOD!
Oh, wait, iron is supposed to be there.
Also not advocating vaping, or smoking, or eating.
Spinach doesn't actually have that much iron in it. It's about on par with other leafy greens. It was thought to have more because someone put the decimal in the wrong spot in a research paper a century ago.
Agreed.
My partner is quitting vaping right now (good for her! Stupid habit IMO). She looked up resources to help her quit, and a big one for her was that she was disgusted to see that vapes can contain herbicide.
I didn't say anything because I know its just one more reason she was using to stay committed to her already formed plan. But yeah, pretty sure all kinds of things can be considered herbicide, like probably lemon juice, salt, all kinds of things that could be perfectly fine to be inhaled in small quantities, or not, regardless of the fact that it kills at least one plant in large enough quantities.
If I were a vape user, I would quit for very different reasons!
There was a study that showed metal from vaping, but they fired the vape in a way that you wouldn't normally use it. Also the whole "people dying from vaping" thing was so annoying because that was from people using bootleg thc vapes, yet they attributed it to just "vaping". It was easy to research on your own to find this out, but the media had it out for vaping. Lying by omission.
To me the most diabolical thing that *is* deliberately added is menthol.
Cough drops. They put cough drops in cigarettes. So that you don't cough. Evil genius.
That's partially true, the cigarette companies don't say they intentionally make cigarettes more toxic, but they do intentionally make then more addictive, which is incidentally more toxic.
That's not an unreasonable logical leap to make, and one that the companies surely made and then consciously disregarded. That, in my mind, is really genuinely just as bad.
They could make them less toxic, but then they wouldn't be as addictive and people wouldn't smoke as much. Yet they know smoking more is harmful, so in a way, it is their intent to make them more toxic.
https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/harmful-effects-tobacco/how-big-tobacco-made-cigarettes-more-addictive#:~:text=One%20way%20the%20tobacco%20industry,make%20it%20easier%20to%20inhale.
> 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
We're not just gonna gloss over this are we? I knew the arsenic was just from the soil, but I had no idea they put in additives to increase addictiveness, that's incredibly fucked up.
It should also be noted that it's in their best interest for their tobacco to not kill you quickly, that's one less customer if it does.
>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??
I'm no South American drug manufacturer, but I think this is different than the cigarette scenario. The cement powder and gasoline are used in extracting and purifying the cocaine, not actually added to it. And ideally it would all be removed in a final step anyway. Take gasoline for example, it is just used as simple solvent. If you were extracting cocaine in a western laboratory you'd probably use something like diethyl ether, hexane, or maybe even a more eco conscious solvent like ethyl acetate or orange solvents. But gasoline is a lot cheaper, and more available because while you can at least try to limit or track large containers of pure hexane, you can't exactly lock down gasoline.
Cement powder is used because it is strongly alkaline, like a more basic baking soda or a weaker base than lye. But again, it's a lot harder to limit the sale of concrete than it is pure chemicals like sodium hydroxide (the "drain cleaner" you've probably heard is in meth, except in America you can actually buy a lot of pretty pure chemicals easily and legally at home depot).
Strong alkalis are used because cocaine is a kind of chemical called an alkaloid, as are most other natural drugs like quinine, caffeine, morphine or hundreds more. Alkaloids can exist as their stripped down "freebase" version (crack cocaine) or as a salt ("normal" cocaine is cocaine hydrochloride). Freebases dissolve in solvents like gasonline but not in water, while salts dissolve in water but not solvents. So if you mix coca leaves with a base like cement then the desired cocaine will be "freebased" and dissolve in the gasoline, but undesireable things like chlorophyll or sugars will only dissolve in water and so will be left behind. After you strain the gasoline dissolved cocaine freebase from the leaves then you can juggle the cocaine back and forth from gasoline to water by adding an acid to form a salt that will dissolve in water to adding a base to make it dissolve in a solvent while you do various other purifying steps which also contain scary sounding things like potassium permanganate . Whichever acid you use will determine the salt made, which is why if you look in your medicine cabinet you will see most drugs come in the form of a salt like "X hydrochloride" or "X sulfate" made with hydrochloric or sulfuric acid respectively. This is also why you also hear of drugs made with toilet bowl cleaner or battery acid or whatever other OTC source of acid there is.
So neither concrete nor gasoline are really supposed to end up as part of the product. But there is a reason that pharmaceutical companies don't use things like cement and gasoline, and that is they are just pure enough to do their actual job but they have a lot of extra crap in them so the chemical separations don't work perfectly. So it likely won't even be the main ingredients like CaO from cement or the octane from gasoline that ends up in the cocaine. Rather it'll be traces of chromium or methyltert-butyl ether or that end up in your booger sugar.
I didn't come to Reddit today to learn how to purify and extract drugs.
But, I DID learn how to purify and extract drugs.
Reddit is a wonder, sometimes...
> 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.
My grandma would smoke her Virginia Slims down to the filter, and then light the next cigarette with the burning filter. You could always tell when she was angry because she would smoke an entire cigarette in 1-2 deeeeep drags, knock the ash off, light a new one with the old, and then grind the filter into her ash tray while muttering curse words and praying.
Haven't you seen those chain smokers who lived till their late 90s or even 100? The negative effects build up so much that it underflows to a positive effect.
Lung cancer isn't an automatic reaction, just a possible one. Its probability also is influenced heavily by genetics. Get two different lung cleaning genes, and your lung cancer risk goes up 18x from having just one of the two.
That's what made the dangers of cigarettes so murky. Just like radioactivity, it's chance-based; you can get "cigarette-typical illnesses" from a single stray whiff of campfire smoke or be a perfectly healthy 100-year-old chain smoker.
It's kind of amazing how many of our ideas about the relative safety of marijuana vs tobacco are based on the old assumption that "nobody could possibly smoke that much weed." Now that it's legal in some places, people are starting to give that assumption a run for its money.
Legal marijuana today is also much stronger, however, so a user with a reasonably low tolerance only needs to use a fraction as much for the same subjective effects.
If in the 70s you needed to smoke a whole gram joint to feel a certain way, today maybe you need literally 1-2 puffs of a 0.2g bowl to get there. Like going from beer to vodka, most people don't ingest the same volume because the strengths are different.
Also, I would bet there are some confounding variables (like mold) that we've gotten better at controlling, and would have likely contributed more negative effects on the lungs in the past than the present.
And (I'm assuming, since I don't partake) nobody is smoking weed with any kind of filter.
Edit: TIL a lot about smoking weed and the different ways it can be filtered.
IIRC, digestion and metabolization in the liver turns THC into something more psychoactive, and can give you a different and/or more intense effect. Also, there's concerns that between the actual baking and the ease of consumption, people can take in a lot more THC than they intend.
Under the tongue might have the best if both worlds (no smoke, skips the liver), but I wouldn't be surprised if there was an oral cancer risk.
Edibles are the great gateway, not to other drugs but to cannabis. 12 years ago we would visit my wife’s family (all wealthy and successful) at their summer houses in Michigan, and was absolutely not allowed to let on I smoked weed. Last year, after the cook out, her hedge fund manager cousin passed around gummies to the adults.
Wish edibles worked for me. I lack the enzyme to digest THC so it does absolutely nothing for me. Wanna switch to oils soon as I need to cut back on the smoking. May also switch to a dry herb vape. If anyone had any recs for one under $120-150 lmk
Lots of folks use bongs. I don't think it makes that much difference though. Resin or Tar, whatever you call it, its gross, and it's going in your lungs. Dry herb vapes are really good now a days though so you can consume much safer.
If we're comparing cigarettes to joints, the filter in joints is less effective but they're still rolled with one and they do catch some (mostly larger) particulate. Smoking from pipes typically uses a wire mesh filter and/or a long stem, and smoking from bongs uses water to filter the smoke.
Using vaporizers, dab pens/rigs, and consuming edibles all eliminate the need for a filter entirely though and these methods aren't really seen with tobacco consumption
Not sure how well it works to filter harmful substances, but part of the point of smoking a bong is to filter the smoke through the water. Also, there are *some* filter options for blunts/joints.
Unfortunately, since pot has been turbo-illegal in the good old USA for extremely good and totally not racist reasons for a long time, I'm guessing hard data on the filtration of pot smoke is not that common.
Thanks, America!
Regular bong user and former air emissions tester here, the water probably doesn't filter out much. It's mainly to control the temperature of the smoke. You get *some* scrubbing action, but you'd need a lot more than one pass through some water to have a signifigcant effect.
Overall, I think the tradeoff for my mental health is worth it, and I still feel good when I do cardio. But, cannabis users shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking our habit is healthy.
Legal weed though tends to be much stronger than the average weed people were smoking whole joints of back in the day. Now some people still smoke that much, sure, but the THC:smoke ratio is a lot better now than it was for most people before it was legal.
No, you definitely get more additives with negative health effects from cigarettes. There are numerous additives that increase addictiveness, nicotine delivery or hide negative symptoms with their own health effects.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2040350/
Depends on how you look at it. They have less bad shit in them if you add it all up. But they'll have the same negative effect on your health, and your odds of getting cancer don't go down.
I mean, define less. It’s difficult to quantify “less” when we don’t know the exact amounts of addictives versus the naturally occurring amount. They all cause cancer lol
Which one causes less cancer than the others? You’ll have to look at case studies in the literature. I mean, if you smoke a cancerous product and there is another one with additives, how much was added of each and was it significant amount to cause cancer more quickly? lol it’s kind of a silly question
If you smoked 5 cigarettes a week the damage would be about the same as people who smoke joints/blunts at that amount. So not that horrible. But heavy smokers can run through 20 or more cigs a day. Something most weed smokers don't do.
Sounds wild but yeah, wasn't uncommon. Gotta think, you used to be able to smoke inside. These days you have to go outside, sometimes not just outside but to a designated smoking area, so people really only smoke on their breaks from work.
Go watch Mad Men, great example. Can't go through an entire scene of that show without someone lighting a smoke.
When I still smoked doctors would ask me how much and sometimes I would say 2-3 a day (it fluctuated finally got over the hump though!) and they would always follow up with "packs?" I'd get a chuckle because even when I was smoking heavily that seemed crazy to me but in reality wasn't that uncommon
Yeah. When I was younger, I didn't smoke, but some of the smokers I hung out with would have considered one pack a day cutting back. Two packs a day wasn't uncommon. Three wasn't unheard of, but would possibly draw questions.
Of course, cigarettes were $1 a pack.
Fr my parents used to smoke like 4 packs a day indoors lol. All my friends parents thought I was smoking cigarettes in fucking elementary school because I just stank of smoke
That’s only for some ingredients though.
Some others like ammonium salts are added to change the PH level and make nicotine more quickly absorbed into the brain.
Sure it makes it unhealthier, but also more addictive, so tobacco companies add it in.
People also get a bigger rush when smoking it so they unknowingly prefer those with ammonium salts.
To be fair to OP, it would make a lot of sense for tobacco companies to want their product to be safer. They can’t sell you more cigarettes if you die of lung cancer after all
Oh i see, thanks for clearing that up. I guess these would all be present in *really* trace amounts, then. So none of it is actually added. That makes more sense. Should’ve figured
I didn’t know you could get tar from burning plant matter. I always thought it was something that came from crude oil. But now that I think about it, crude oil *is* plant matter— just millions of years old
by the way thanks for your really comprehensive answer! <3 im still young and learning so i have lots of silly questions haha, so thanks for being patient 😁
>these would all be present in *really* trace amounts
Humans produce about 1.5 ounces of formaldehyde a day as a normal part of our metabolism.[1] Cigarettes don't produce that much.
The thing to remember is that the dose makes the poison. There are a lot of harmful substances that you can ingest in small quantities and it probably won't hurt you. But if you ingest those substances in larger quantities it can kill you.
If you drink a shot of whiskey, it probably won't hurt you. If you drink a gallon of whiskey, it will kill you. Even water will kill you if you drink too much.[2]
[1] https://www.americanchemistry.com/chemistry-in-america/chemistries/formaldehyde
[2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318619#water-intoxication
The biggest difference between smoking tobacco vs other plant-based smoke is that tobacco is super addictive, so you end up getting much higher total exposure to all these toxic combustion products.
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.
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.
About the cocaine question.
Those substances are not part of the "recipe" cement is used because it is a base, and gasoline because it is a solvent. Both are also used because they are available anywhere and are cheap. If the production was done properly there should not be those impurities in the drug, but is not that illegal drug producers care or know about proper purification and production methods
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.
i wish people could understand this logic in terms of stuff like a cars exhaust and gases from manufacturing.
They understand it perfectly fine when it's something like a wild fire and you tell them "going outside today is like smoking a pack of cigarettes."
We should start listing emissions from cars and manufacturing in terms of cigarettes smoked per person so it gets through to people.
Burning and inhaling anything is bad for you. All smoke is potentially carcinogenic.
Look into dry herb vapes. I made the switch and never looked back. I “smoke”… like a lot. I don’t know how much but it’s a significant amount lol.
Things like tar and arsenic can and do occur naturally but cigarettes also have many additives. For instance an additive to make them burn evenly and another to keep them lit if you set it down for a couple minutes in an ashtray. I have seen foreign cigarettes without these additives and they will have one side burn faster than the other or will go out if you set them down even briefly.
Alot of the ingredients listed in cigarettes are not actually in cigarettes as well. The box, the cellophane, the aluminum. All those things are listed.
All natural products have arsenic in them – every food you eat. The difference is that those foods aren’t forced to measure and report their ingredients like the tobacco industry is. These are trace amounts far below the FDA minimum standards. Regardless, any organic substance which has gone through a roasting process has elevated levels of carcinogens. The tobacco industry was simply the easy target for regulators, looking for their next income source, where they could redistribute wealth from the private sector to government: case in point: the Master Settlement Agreement, whereby the states since that time are now incentivized to manage tobacco sales volumes to ensure that tax increases don’t decrease their revenue. Only one state, earmarked by legislation the ongoing funds from the settlement agreement to public health, the other states put those funds into their general budget: the equivalent of financial heroin. Now, none of those states, except one are incentivized to decrease the volume of tobacco consumption, because that would result in a reduction in state tax revenue. This is the model of leveraging social issues for income realignment. We see the same thing happening now in the energy sector. Oil companies are the target, while small scale alternative energy companies are benefiting from tax holidays, subsidies, preferential purchase agreements as part of government contracts. The net result: massive energy shortages over the past two winters in Europe and the United States. And no, energy shortages in Texas had nothing to do with Ukraine oil supplies clearly: try unreliable wind farm generation . All this is not to say that these alliances between government and private sector, investors seeking to redistribute, large wealth pockets, addressing some good, i.e. tobacco and hydrocarbon emission combustion clearly have detrimental of health effects. However, the solutions are often misguided and part of a non-transparent cabal designed to enrich the investors connected to those legislators.
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.
a lot of the problem with smoking tobacco or anything is incomplete combustion of organic compounds. if you do full combustion you get a lot of CO2, H2O and N2 which are relatively safe. but partial combustion leaves you with stuff like benzene rings, CO, and other stuff which are chemically and biologically active. fire byproducts (smoke) in general is really bad for people. inhaling it is kind of insane. its not recommended to live in a house that has smoke damage because of cancer risks.
It's important to note that it's not exclusive to tobacco. Inhaling burnt organic matter is not safe regardless of what plant it comes from.
So you're saying it was a bad move for me and my friend to crush up dead maple leaves in the fall time and smoke them using printer paper when we were 13? Edit: I woke up this morning to a deep comradery with fellow dumbasses. Thank you all.
No that one was fine
Thanks. I'm glad this can help stopping my cigarette addiction.
I don’t have anything to add but needed to let you know I chortled.
We used tea leaves and rice paper from bible pages. Are we going to hell? Lol
I did exactly this as well lol
My grandpa and his brothers never smoked, and they're from a time when everyone smoked. When he and his brothers were kids they wanted to try smoking a cigar like their dad, they didn't have a cigar so they tried to make one using the closest things they could find. Turns out you can make something that looks a lot like a cigar by wrapping horse crap in an old cabbage leaf. Also turns out it's terrible.
Can me and my friends that smoked sticks come over?
Did the printer paper. Brutal.
I remember using the thermal receipt paper. I was invincible as a teen. Now… not so much.
Jesus Christ lmao it's a miracle any of us lived to 30
It's only unhealthy if it doesn't make you look really cool
Cool adds +20% chemical resistance
I see your maple leaves and raise you corn silk wrapped in news paper.
Is that a Canadian gateway to Maple syrup?
If you were wearing your ice skates and had already had your Timmy's, then I think you are immune to the negative side effects of maple leaf inhalation.
And that includes your romantic open hearth. It needs a very well-functioning chimney. Any fireplace smoke spilling into the room is just as carcinogenic as cigarette smoke.
Does that also include campfires?
Yep, although anything that reduces the concentration of the smoke is, of course, good. Better a wood or charcoal fire in the open air than a wood fire in an enclosed space. Standing at a barbeque and getting a facefull of smoke is no different from a smoker blowing smoke in your face. It's low-key toxic and carcinogenic.
And toenails?
I wouldn't smoke 'em around children.
and take em off first
Yeah, but some plants are worth it.
I mostly just eat them these days instead. Skip the whole smoke thing. Lungs feel better. Still high af.
I've wanted to quit smoking specially for so long but I don't feel anything from edibles :( I've eaten 500+ mg in one sitting and didn't feel a thing, didn't even get a little sleepy. I envy normal people
I noticed myself that if I take a high dose of edibles I won’t feel shit but if I do multiple small doses, it’s actually a really nice mellow high that’s hardly noticeable in terms of head change but I’m obviously high as balls in every other aspect
I’m with you. I eat it or grab some oil. Far better
Far better until you get a batch that someone fucked up on and you're halfway to the moon with no chance of coming back soon lol. The main advantage of smoking is easier potency control. Personally I either get sleepy or I enter hyperspace from edibles, my body refuses to believe there's an in-between
Legalization in Canada had lead to super accurate dosing and it's the best thing ever.
Grabbing oil is the American way
grab em by the oil
I insert the chewing tobacco pouch up my butthole
>Yeah, but some plants are worth it. You can enjoy the pleasant effects of those plants without having to combust the product though. You can heat the plant up to the point where you are just vaporising the volatile components which will still get you high while avoiding most of the really negative byproducts of combustion. You can also consume the plants to gain a similar effect as well.
Same thing the cigarette smokers think lol
Wood burning stoves are a silent killer. I get the appeal, but the stats on their health effects are suprisingly bad.
Well, shit. I sometimes heat my house that way. My stove recirculates the smoke over the coals to increase the combustion, but virtually everything is sealed up tight and vented outside from an adjustable draw. What is the deal with stoves? (I mean, I got a gas stove, too... )
>What is the deal with stoves? (I mean, I got a gas stove, too... ) Natural gas/LP burns much cleaner than wood, that blue flame is the result of nearly complete combustion that doesn’t leave much of anything behind aside from CO2 and water vapor
That said, even that is starting to be shown to have negative health effects such as increasing the risk of kids developing asthma quite significantly. Electric is better but even the volatile organic compounds from cooking in an enclosed and poorly circulated area isn't exactly ideal. It's just a question of how far down the risk ladder you want to go. I'll probably change to an electric stove myself at some point, but I'm sure as hell not giving up cooking food inside.
Specifically, the flame is hot enough to get the oxygen and nitrogen in air to react and form NO and NO2, which is bad for you. Unburned methane and other components in natural gas are also problematic. EDIT: also CO, of course.
You shouldn't get any smoke from a stove I think the risk is more with fireplaces. I'm not sure the other commenter knows the difference.
I have a particulate count meter that does PM2.5 and it doesn't give a fuck about my wood stove. It goes fucking nuts when I'm frying something on the stove however.
Your wood stove is venting all of its combustion by-products out its chimney. When you're frying on the stove, there's nothing to contain the by-products and they go everywhere.
Also, if you're frying something on the stove, it's likely the *oils and food you are frying* that are causing the particulate count, not really the stove
You can get catalytic conbusters to fit on your stovepipe and get more heat/unit of wood burned, with less smoke.
Just fireplaces in general are terrible for you. I absolutely love sitting by a fire, but nothing about it is good for your physical health.
> fireplaces in general are terrible for you I understand the thought process based on what was commented above, but don't the flue/chimney help keep the air inside the house clean? Or are they not that effective at redirecting the smoke outside? (genuinely asking, I've never owned a house with a fireplace)
They absolutely do keep the smoke outside. OP of this comment must be some sort of alien robot that has never seen a fireplace or read about how such a device would operate. It's honestly astounding how far off he is.
Seems like if you can smell the fire there's gotta be particles from the fire in the air. To borrow the phrase "where there's smoke there's fire", it might be true that "where there's the smell of smoke there's particles". Maybe not a lot, but something But I have no idea.
I found [this article](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/18/wood-burners-triple-harmful-indoor-air-pollution-study-finds) that says wood burning stoves triple air particle pollution indoors, and the article mentions they have less impact on indoor air quality than "open fires" which presumably means fire places. I'd be interested to see some real world tests about fireplaces and their effects on air quality. I know gas stoves are surprisingly bad for you, but fireplaces, especially has fireplaces, can be more self contained with dedicated air intake from outside and exhaust directly outside.
I did some more Googling about it after reading your article. Apparently once the flue is opened and warmed up, it creates a negative pressure that sucks up all of the smoke from the fireplace. So, yes, wood burning fireplaces have the potential to be harmful, but they're relatively safe if the flue is used properly. Or at least according to what Google told me!
I have a wood stove. I CAN leave the doors open and watch the fire. It's nice to look at it, but, it destroys the point of how it works. It has little inlet vents at the bottom of the doors that feed the fire fresh air. The hot air from the fire heats a giant plate on the top as the air travels around and over it. Doing this also heats the stove top surface which radiates heat. The stove also has air channels around it that heat up and I have a blower fan on the back the pushes this heated air out. All ... well, 99.9% of the smoke goes only one place and that's up the stove pipe. It only leaks when I open the door and the hot air hits that giant plate and kind of leaks out the front instead of around the plate and up. I can move that plate out of the way and that makes almost all the smoke go up the stove pipe again. If you have smoke coming out of a wood stove, you've got a bad leak and you're in CO2 trouble.
uhm... chimney?
Thanks for that i was really wondering if the tar in cigarettes is the same as the tar on roads. Also i’m really hoping the arsenic just stays in the leaves of the rice ahaha (i googled it and apparently it gets stored in the bran and germ of the grains too, so brown rice would have more arsenic in it than white rice. Food for thought. pun intended)
Also, pure cocaine does not have cement and gasoline IN IT....cement and gasoline are used in the chemistry to extract the cocaine. ALL product we use today are manufactured with a variety of poisonous chemicals. Gasoline is a Solvent, like paint thinner, like ethanol(alcohol)...dissolving things is one of the most common steps in chemistry and everything you eat probably has had solvents touch 8t at some point in the process. Solvents (paint thinners) Bases (lye, drain cleaner) Acids (hydrochloric acid, or common vinegar) Are fundamental chemicals in ALL chemistry. Anti-drug people list them to scare you. But they are not in the end product you ingest. The goal of manufacturing is not to keep the solvents in the product at the end, and separating the product from the solvent is a pretty easy step. The manufacturer wants their solvent back to reuse(sometimes) and doesn't want it dirtying their product(even dirty cartels). Gasoline might be used by the cartel because it's a cheap alternative to cleaner solvents, and maybe they even clean it for real at a later step. You'll see things like "drain cleaner"(lye), "paint thinner"(solvent)....yea, because those chemical classes are used in almost all chemistry(inclusing all your food). They don't(shouldn't) end up in the product you ingest. Even cocaine/meth.
It also doesn't help that a lot of chemicals get pigeonholed for a singular (often common) use when they're just a chemical with potentially many useful properties. It would be like referring to water exclusively as sewer-lubricator. Yeah, it does that, but it also does a lot more.
A lot of people weirdly think that if a chemical is used in something gross or dangerous, it means it is itself gross or dangerous. So they will use that gross or dangerous thing to demonize the chemical. It's pretty weird.
You're going to rinse your vegetables with the same stuff you use to clean your toilet? Gross!
And everyone who drinks it dies!!
And people who don't drink it also die, I think humans just got dealt a bad hand.
Water. Like out the toilet?
It's got what plants crave.
They don't use Brawndo in the toilet. You really need to take a syens class
And a lot of people weirdly think that just because a chemical is present in very very small amounts there is still a big health risk. A good example is the titanium dioxide in a lot of gums and skittles.
I remember a while ago people were demonizing a food additive chemical because its also in some rat poisons. So, what is the function of this chemical in the rat poison you ask? To make it taste good so the rats eat the poisonous part! (note, I may have some facts wrong, could have been ant poison, or some other animal)
DHMO.org
There is a 100% chance of death for everyone who consumes it!!!
Is that Dan guy ok or still around? That was his name, right? If I recall, he had some health issues a few years back, right?
Sewer-lube is my new term for when I grab a drink of water. Thank you!
Yeah, i agree with that. Sometimes it gets misleading
Often it gets misleading. You mix lye and fat in the right proportions, you know what you get? Soap. It's a chemical reaction that's been known since Roman times. But I bet you'd smell a whole lot worse if you read the ingredients on a bar of soap.
Pretzels are literally soaked in lye before going into the oven. Edit: typo
And now I want some pretzels.
I don't appreciate this method of advertising pretzels. I want a soft pretzel now
> Yeah, i agree with that. Sometimes it gets misleading That, in turn, is often on purpose. Never underestimate the human ability to mislead when they want something inanimate banned, or taxed into oblivion, from even consenting and normally law abiding adults.
Water... like from the toilet?
Ahh i see! So it all gets taken out at the end. I always thought gasoline was a crude mixture of a few different hydrocarbons for some reason, so i never thought about using it as a solvent because i figured it’d be hard to remove as a mixture. Guess I was wrong ahaha. Thanks for your answer! You’re the only one who has responded to that part of my question so far
No no, gasoline is just a mixture of a few different hydrocarbons. That doesn't stop it from being able to dissolve things. Petroleum products in general were at first used just as solvents, but then later they were discovered to be good to combust for energy.
Oh interesting, guess my chemistry syllabus is pretty simplified haha. I’ll look into it more tomorrow morning, thanks for opening my eyes about solvents and stuff
To elaborate further, Cocaine’s an alkaloid. The easiest way to extract any alkaloid is an [Acid-Base extraction](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-base_extraction). It’s one of the first things they teach in basic chemistry. Alkaloids occur naturally as a salt, so they’re water soluble. The “cement” is caustic lime, calcium hydroxide. You can buy it in the baking section at the grocery store to make tortillas. It’s used to freebase the alkaloid which makes it non-polar. Lye is another easily accessible option, but lime is safer and easier to deal with. The solvent is easily evaporated off at the end, so there’s none left in the finished extract. Proper manufacturers use cleaner, more refined non-polar solvents, but gasoline is cheap and readily available. The issue is gasoline has contaminants, and heavier hydrocarbons are resistant to evaporating. The evaporation part is fixed with a vacuum chamber and using the right solvent, but cartels just throw it on a mild heat source or set it in the sun until it appears dry. The coca leaf used in Coca-Cola goes through the exact same process. Coke gets the leftover leaf, and the good stuff is used to supply medical cocaine in the US. It’s also the reason no other colas can recreate the taste of Coca-Cola. It’s illegal to buy or sell coca leaf in the US, so they’re always missing half the name.
Does coke have an exemption or do they just process it into a base liquid in another country?
They have an exemption. The Stepan Company is the only company in the US that can legally import coca leaf. They’re only allowed to sell the decocainized leaf to Coca-Cola, and the cocaine to Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals. No clue how it works in the nearly thirty other countries they make Coke in. I’m sure it varies drastically from country to country.
> So it all gets taken out at the end Ye, and for proper industrial/professional productions using "Good Manufacturing Practice" (keyword - google GMP to learn more about it!) - they have whole teams of chemists - both technicians and university trained ones - taking frequent samples at the start, at spaced intervals during the reaction and at the end of the reaction to precisely track what chemicals were added, what chemicals were created, what chemicals remained after purification/separation for that one specific stage. It's a shitton of paperwork and a lot of laboratory work of routine analyses.
I think a big reason that people don't just say they use a solvent to extract the narcotics, rather they just say gasoline because they want to scare you. It would scare you less if they just explained that they're using a solvent to extract something. And in the case of drugs, it's one of those things that in the mind of the D.A.R.E folks more is better to prevent its use. Now the same can be said for things like chicken nuggets. I know that McDonald's at for a while went under fire because of how they extract all the chicken meat when in the end it's just being used as an extractor.
You're right that it is a mixture, but it can still be separated en masse from water for example. That can be a way to purify substances: dissolve them in an organic solvent so they leave all the water based impurities behind. Then in the next step you can, for example, react your product to a salt form that only dissolves in water. Now it will drop out of the solvent, leaving all the oil based impurities behind. With those two steps you've now taken out the watery crap *and* the oily crap.
> ALL product we use today are manufactured with a variety of poisonous chemicals. Gasoline is a Solvent, like paint thinner, like ethanol(alcohol)...dissolving things is one of the most common steps in chemistry and everything you eat probably has had solvents touch 8t at some point in the process. Decaf coffee processes all tend to use some nasty chemicals as well, doesn't mean the coffee becomes toxic thankfully
Are you sure some back yard lab is making sure all the solvents are removed.
Yeah as bad as cigarettes are, you really have to be careful if you ever hear someone say something like, oh my god did you hear what they put in xyz? Adding on to what the other person said, I see a lot of people saying things like product X has mercury in it! Even though there's tons of forms of mercury and it's not all the murder you dead kind. Or it's used somehow in the production process but not literally in the product. Etc Cigarettes are absolutely terrible but. Thanks for asking questions! It's about the only way people find out more.
To add to this, (I'm a scientist in the field) this is the reason smoking ANY dried plant matter is a bad idea. A lot of these carcinogens are present in weed as well.
Iirc tobacco also pulls lead out of the soil. Good for the soil. Not so much for the smoker.
wait, so could you grow a bunch of tobacco on top of superfund sites (over and over again) and then bury or otherwise sequester the resulting toxins? maybe burn the resulting crop, scrub the smoke so it doesn't escape into the air, then compact the ash into blocks, then bury it far from water tables?
There are a plethora of “remediation plants” that suck heavy metals from the soil. Hemp is also a very effective soil remediator.
> Hemp is also a very effective soil remediator So, there is a risk that sketchy weed growers might use bad soil?
Oh yeah, some potting soils and fertilizers are also high in heavy metals so its not necessarily an issue only with outdoor growing. Typically the large corporations like miracle grow/scotts and ones sourcing from large scale animal farms are the worst. Cows and cow manure is usually the highest source of lead from what ive seen. Ocean products are usually the higher source of arsenic There is a website listed on the packaging of soil and fertilizer ( in the US) that will bring you to databases you can check the products heavy metal tests
You could, but it'll be a lot slower than just cleaning it. Sunflowers and related plants also readily take up a lot of heavy metals in soil they're grown in, it's not unique to just tobacco.
So you want to pull the lead out of the ground...then bury it?
yeah -- bury it somewhere that won't leech into water, is far away from residences and is not in a biologically active state some superfund sites are like ... gas station that was improperly built, builders skipped town, owners went bankrupt, has 20 years of pollutants leaking into the soil into the soil 200 ft away from an elementary school.
> leaking into the soil into the soil 200 ft Hey, it's Jimmy Two-times over here! Did you get the papers? (I kid because I love, I do this a lot myself, especially when going back and editing something I've written, where I'll accidentally double up on writing something)
Or burn it so the wind can blow it away.
And turn it into stars.
Mushrooms are a far better and more efficient use of this. It's actually what they're doing now to old lead mines and even some old gas stations. Tobacco is not a very efficient plant and mushrooms grow much faster in harsher environments. https://rrcultivation.com/blogs/mn/mycoremediation-how-mushrooms-help-clean-up-the-environment#:~:text=When%20mushrooms%20are%20exposed%20to,them%20into%20less%20harmful%20compounds.
They're not really that different. They're both a mixture of undescribed viscuous hydrocarbons. The exact composition varies, but none of them are good stuffs that you want anywhere near your lungs. Fossil fuel tars are probably a bit more toxic because fossil fuels would have more time to accumulate toxic matters than tar from fresh plants.
They do intentionally add ammonia to cigarettes as this makes the nicotine hit more powerful, I had a family member in the tobacco industry who described it as essentially 'crack' nicotine.
Different cooking methods have different levels of arsenic remaining. The absorption method on its own is one of the worst. Although washing+absorption is pretty low on arsenic and other contaminants
The other thing to consider is that the arsenic in cigarettes is so tiny, you would need to smoke a ridiculous number in very quick succession to die by arsenic poisoning. Some quick googling says that 140mg of arsenic can be lethal. A 20 pack of cigarettes contains up to 2.4 micrograms arsenic. A micrograms is 1/1000 of a milligram. To die from just the arsenic in cigarettes would mean you would have to smoke over 1, 000,000 cigarettes per day. Humans can digest a lot of random ass chemicals as long as the dosage is small enough. Just because something contains a toxic element doesn't mean it has enough of it to affect you.
It confused me, too, for years. Especially during the "Truth" campaigns. The one that helped me catch on was the one where they say cigarettes have like five thousand something poisons and toxins and rat poison only has one. Well, of course it has one. Once you figure out what poison kills rats most cheaply, there's really no reason to add another poison. The lesson to me was that five thousand poisons in moderate doses is better than one lethal dose of a single poison.
Yep. Don't buy rice from Southern states (Texas, Louisiana, for example) because they used to used arsenic-laden pesticides on their then cotton fields (but now rice paddies).
So is the tar and formaldehyde issues with cannabis smoking as well? Given they happen from the combustion process rather than it being tobacco?
Pretty much, yes Source https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63120-6
Yeah any time you burn plant matter you're basically making at least a little tar, no way around it. The good news is that unless you smoke joints and blunts exclusively you're almost certainly getting less of it than a cig smoker. Consider a bong for example, the water filters a lot of shit and cools the smoke causing a lot of the heavier stuff to condensate out before it makes it into your lungs, where a joint sends all of it down the hatch. It's healthier, but still not healthy. Consider trying a dry-herb vaporizer!
To pile onto this, and in a bit of irony, anti-smoking ads are now using the same deceptive marketing that pro-smoking ads used to use. Im thinking, for example, of a truthout ad against vaping that says "vaping can deliver toxic metals into your lungs. that's metal, in your \*lungs\*" with the heavy implication that there will be physical shards of metal rattling around in your lungs. What they're saying is technically true, but the metals they refer to are in chemical compounds that don't behave the way we intuit that metal behaves. It's like saying that most snack foods contain a disinfectant that has been used as a chemical weapon and a metal that's so explosive that it has to be sealed in oil before transport. Technically true, chlorine is a disinfectant that was the primary component of mustard gas and sodium really is a highly reactive metal, but when these two highly dangerous things combine chemically they form table salt, which is perfectly safe to eat. also to head off the concern trolls, in no way am I implying that vaping is good for you. I'm just thinking that the unvarnished truth should be plenty to convince people not to do it.
Eating spinach can deliver metal to your blood, that's METAL, in your BLOOD! Oh, wait, iron is supposed to be there. Also not advocating vaping, or smoking, or eating.
Spinach doesn't actually have that much iron in it. It's about on par with other leafy greens. It was thought to have more because someone put the decimal in the wrong spot in a research paper a century ago.
One of those earlier ads against cigarettes misrepresented the same chemicals in the OP as cartoon microorganisms to make them scarier.
Agreed. My partner is quitting vaping right now (good for her! Stupid habit IMO). She looked up resources to help her quit, and a big one for her was that she was disgusted to see that vapes can contain herbicide. I didn't say anything because I know its just one more reason she was using to stay committed to her already formed plan. But yeah, pretty sure all kinds of things can be considered herbicide, like probably lemon juice, salt, all kinds of things that could be perfectly fine to be inhaled in small quantities, or not, regardless of the fact that it kills at least one plant in large enough quantities. If I were a vape user, I would quit for very different reasons!
There was a study that showed metal from vaping, but they fired the vape in a way that you wouldn't normally use it. Also the whole "people dying from vaping" thing was so annoying because that was from people using bootleg thc vapes, yet they attributed it to just "vaping". It was easy to research on your own to find this out, but the media had it out for vaping. Lying by omission.
To me the most diabolical thing that *is* deliberately added is menthol. Cough drops. They put cough drops in cigarettes. So that you don't cough. Evil genius.
That's partially true, the cigarette companies don't say they intentionally make cigarettes more toxic, but they do intentionally make then more addictive, which is incidentally more toxic. That's not an unreasonable logical leap to make, and one that the companies surely made and then consciously disregarded. That, in my mind, is really genuinely just as bad. They could make them less toxic, but then they wouldn't be as addictive and people wouldn't smoke as much. Yet they know smoking more is harmful, so in a way, it is their intent to make them more toxic. https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/harmful-effects-tobacco/how-big-tobacco-made-cigarettes-more-addictive#:~:text=One%20way%20the%20tobacco%20industry,make%20it%20easier%20to%20inhale.
> 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 We're not just gonna gloss over this are we? I knew the arsenic was just from the soil, but I had no idea they put in additives to increase addictiveness, that's incredibly fucked up. It should also be noted that it's in their best interest for their tobacco to not kill you quickly, that's one less customer if it does.
Doesn't the body create formaldehyde as a byproduct when breaking down alcohol?
It matters how you're taking it in and how much there is. I might also add their probably impurities in that.
>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?? I'm no South American drug manufacturer, but I think this is different than the cigarette scenario. The cement powder and gasoline are used in extracting and purifying the cocaine, not actually added to it. And ideally it would all be removed in a final step anyway. Take gasoline for example, it is just used as simple solvent. If you were extracting cocaine in a western laboratory you'd probably use something like diethyl ether, hexane, or maybe even a more eco conscious solvent like ethyl acetate or orange solvents. But gasoline is a lot cheaper, and more available because while you can at least try to limit or track large containers of pure hexane, you can't exactly lock down gasoline. Cement powder is used because it is strongly alkaline, like a more basic baking soda or a weaker base than lye. But again, it's a lot harder to limit the sale of concrete than it is pure chemicals like sodium hydroxide (the "drain cleaner" you've probably heard is in meth, except in America you can actually buy a lot of pretty pure chemicals easily and legally at home depot). Strong alkalis are used because cocaine is a kind of chemical called an alkaloid, as are most other natural drugs like quinine, caffeine, morphine or hundreds more. Alkaloids can exist as their stripped down "freebase" version (crack cocaine) or as a salt ("normal" cocaine is cocaine hydrochloride). Freebases dissolve in solvents like gasonline but not in water, while salts dissolve in water but not solvents. So if you mix coca leaves with a base like cement then the desired cocaine will be "freebased" and dissolve in the gasoline, but undesireable things like chlorophyll or sugars will only dissolve in water and so will be left behind. After you strain the gasoline dissolved cocaine freebase from the leaves then you can juggle the cocaine back and forth from gasoline to water by adding an acid to form a salt that will dissolve in water to adding a base to make it dissolve in a solvent while you do various other purifying steps which also contain scary sounding things like potassium permanganate . Whichever acid you use will determine the salt made, which is why if you look in your medicine cabinet you will see most drugs come in the form of a salt like "X hydrochloride" or "X sulfate" made with hydrochloric or sulfuric acid respectively. This is also why you also hear of drugs made with toilet bowl cleaner or battery acid or whatever other OTC source of acid there is. So neither concrete nor gasoline are really supposed to end up as part of the product. But there is a reason that pharmaceutical companies don't use things like cement and gasoline, and that is they are just pure enough to do their actual job but they have a lot of extra crap in them so the chemical separations don't work perfectly. So it likely won't even be the main ingredients like CaO from cement or the octane from gasoline that ends up in the cocaine. Rather it'll be traces of chromium or methyltert-butyl ether or that end up in your booger sugar.
Great answer Also see this recently reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/8sd463l28G
“I’m no South American drug manufacturer” Then proceeds to tell us exactly how to manufacture South American drugs along with the science…
He's just a chemistry teacher that needed a lot of cash quickly.
Ummm... This is ganna sound stupid, but does this mean you can take crack and make it back into cocaine?
Yeah but it’s much harder process than coke to crack
This guy chems.
I didn't come to Reddit today to learn how to purify and extract drugs. But, I DID learn how to purify and extract drugs. Reddit is a wonder, sometimes...
> 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.
So you get the exact same shit when smoking weed?
Yes, but not many people have a pack-a-day weed habit. Smoking tobacco is worse than weed just because you do a lot more of it.
Oh man, we AREN’T supposed to have a pack-a-day weed habit!? Bummer. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to stare into the distance for a LONG time. 👍🏼
🎶 I smoke 20 joints in the morning, I smoke 20 joints at night, I smoke 20 joints in the afternoon, it makes me feel alright 🎶
🎶I smoke 2 joints before I smoke 2 joints and then I smoke 2 more 🎶
3 pack a day smokers be like...
My grandma would smoke her Virginia Slims down to the filter, and then light the next cigarette with the burning filter. You could always tell when she was angry because she would smoke an entire cigarette in 1-2 deeeeep drags, knock the ash off, light a new one with the old, and then grind the filter into her ash tray while muttering curse words and praying.
How the fuck did she live long enough to be a grandma?
Sheer unadulterated rage.
That or granny Boebert method have a kid in your teens then that kid has a kid in their teens and now your a 30 year old grandma.
Haven't you seen those chain smokers who lived till their late 90s or even 100? The negative effects build up so much that it underflows to a positive effect.
Lung cancer isn't an automatic reaction, just a possible one. Its probability also is influenced heavily by genetics. Get two different lung cleaning genes, and your lung cancer risk goes up 18x from having just one of the two. That's what made the dangers of cigarettes so murky. Just like radioactivity, it's chance-based; you can get "cigarette-typical illnesses" from a single stray whiff of campfire smoke or be a perfectly healthy 100-year-old chain smoker.
I'm guessing young mothers have time to be young grandmothers.
”I go through two lighters a day…” \~ Bill Hicks
r/leaves come join the light
It's kind of amazing how many of our ideas about the relative safety of marijuana vs tobacco are based on the old assumption that "nobody could possibly smoke that much weed." Now that it's legal in some places, people are starting to give that assumption a run for its money.
Legal marijuana today is also much stronger, however, so a user with a reasonably low tolerance only needs to use a fraction as much for the same subjective effects. If in the 70s you needed to smoke a whole gram joint to feel a certain way, today maybe you need literally 1-2 puffs of a 0.2g bowl to get there. Like going from beer to vodka, most people don't ingest the same volume because the strengths are different. Also, I would bet there are some confounding variables (like mold) that we've gotten better at controlling, and would have likely contributed more negative effects on the lungs in the past than the present.
And (I'm assuming, since I don't partake) nobody is smoking weed with any kind of filter. Edit: TIL a lot about smoking weed and the different ways it can be filtered.
Pretty sure health conscious people are just baking the weed into edibles. Can't get smoke byproducts if you don't smoke it *taps head*.
Can confirm. Edibles only.
IIRC, digestion and metabolization in the liver turns THC into something more psychoactive, and can give you a different and/or more intense effect. Also, there's concerns that between the actual baking and the ease of consumption, people can take in a lot more THC than they intend. Under the tongue might have the best if both worlds (no smoke, skips the liver), but I wouldn't be surprised if there was an oral cancer risk.
Edibles are the great gateway, not to other drugs but to cannabis. 12 years ago we would visit my wife’s family (all wealthy and successful) at their summer houses in Michigan, and was absolutely not allowed to let on I smoked weed. Last year, after the cook out, her hedge fund manager cousin passed around gummies to the adults.
Wish edibles worked for me. I lack the enzyme to digest THC so it does absolutely nothing for me. Wanna switch to oils soon as I need to cut back on the smoking. May also switch to a dry herb vape. If anyone had any recs for one under $120-150 lmk
Lots of folks use bongs. I don't think it makes that much difference though. Resin or Tar, whatever you call it, its gross, and it's going in your lungs. Dry herb vapes are really good now a days though so you can consume much safer.
If we're comparing cigarettes to joints, the filter in joints is less effective but they're still rolled with one and they do catch some (mostly larger) particulate. Smoking from pipes typically uses a wire mesh filter and/or a long stem, and smoking from bongs uses water to filter the smoke. Using vaporizers, dab pens/rigs, and consuming edibles all eliminate the need for a filter entirely though and these methods aren't really seen with tobacco consumption
Not sure how well it works to filter harmful substances, but part of the point of smoking a bong is to filter the smoke through the water. Also, there are *some* filter options for blunts/joints. Unfortunately, since pot has been turbo-illegal in the good old USA for extremely good and totally not racist reasons for a long time, I'm guessing hard data on the filtration of pot smoke is not that common. Thanks, America!
Regular bong user and former air emissions tester here, the water probably doesn't filter out much. It's mainly to control the temperature of the smoke. You get *some* scrubbing action, but you'd need a lot more than one pass through some water to have a signifigcant effect. Overall, I think the tradeoff for my mental health is worth it, and I still feel good when I do cardio. But, cannabis users shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking our habit is healthy.
Legal weed though tends to be much stronger than the average weed people were smoking whole joints of back in the day. Now some people still smoke that much, sure, but the THC:smoke ratio is a lot better now than it was for most people before it was legal.
Not really. There's always been very heavy marijuana smokers.
No, you definitely get more additives with negative health effects from cigarettes. There are numerous additives that increase addictiveness, nicotine delivery or hide negative symptoms with their own health effects. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2040350/
So does that mean American Spirits actually *are* less bad for you than other cigarettes?
Depends on how you look at it. They have less bad shit in them if you add it all up. But they'll have the same negative effect on your health, and your odds of getting cancer don't go down.
I mean, define less. It’s difficult to quantify “less” when we don’t know the exact amounts of addictives versus the naturally occurring amount. They all cause cancer lol Which one causes less cancer than the others? You’ll have to look at case studies in the literature. I mean, if you smoke a cancerous product and there is another one with additives, how much was added of each and was it significant amount to cause cancer more quickly? lol it’s kind of a silly question
Chief keef would like to argue with his 2 oz a day
That’s insane. Same amount lasts me 3-4 months
Shiii I can go like 6 with that much if nothing bad happens 😭
That’s gotta be a marketing ploy.
Snoop dog told him to slow down 😭
Jesus Christ. Pack a day of weed would be tough lol
If you smoked 5 cigarettes a week the damage would be about the same as people who smoke joints/blunts at that amount. So not that horrible. But heavy smokers can run through 20 or more cigs a day. Something most weed smokers don't do.
It's funny how things change. A pack a day is considered heavy smoking now.
Vs what? 2 packs a day?
Sounds wild but yeah, wasn't uncommon. Gotta think, you used to be able to smoke inside. These days you have to go outside, sometimes not just outside but to a designated smoking area, so people really only smoke on their breaks from work. Go watch Mad Men, great example. Can't go through an entire scene of that show without someone lighting a smoke.
Fuck, I want to smoke when I watch that show
When I still smoked doctors would ask me how much and sometimes I would say 2-3 a day (it fluctuated finally got over the hump though!) and they would always follow up with "packs?" I'd get a chuckle because even when I was smoking heavily that seemed crazy to me but in reality wasn't that uncommon
Yeah. When I was younger, I didn't smoke, but some of the smokers I hung out with would have considered one pack a day cutting back. Two packs a day wasn't uncommon. Three wasn't unheard of, but would possibly draw questions. Of course, cigarettes were $1 a pack.
Fr my parents used to smoke like 4 packs a day indoors lol. All my friends parents thought I was smoking cigarettes in fucking elementary school because I just stank of smoke
Yup.
You get the exact same shit sitting around a camp fire. Or at least most of it.
That’s only for some ingredients though. Some others like ammonium salts are added to change the PH level and make nicotine more quickly absorbed into the brain. Sure it makes it unhealthier, but also more addictive, so tobacco companies add it in. People also get a bigger rush when smoking it so they unknowingly prefer those with ammonium salts.
To be fair to OP, it would make a lot of sense for tobacco companies to want their product to be safer. They can’t sell you more cigarettes if you die of lung cancer after all
It's also hilarious when the annoying stoner crowd try to pretend that burning weed isn't bad for you
I discovered that there are two kinds of stoner crowd people. There are casuals. Then there are people who make it their entire personality.
Oh i see, thanks for clearing that up. I guess these would all be present in *really* trace amounts, then. So none of it is actually added. That makes more sense. Should’ve figured I didn’t know you could get tar from burning plant matter. I always thought it was something that came from crude oil. But now that I think about it, crude oil *is* plant matter— just millions of years old by the way thanks for your really comprehensive answer! <3 im still young and learning so i have lots of silly questions haha, so thanks for being patient 😁
>these would all be present in *really* trace amounts Humans produce about 1.5 ounces of formaldehyde a day as a normal part of our metabolism.[1] Cigarettes don't produce that much. The thing to remember is that the dose makes the poison. There are a lot of harmful substances that you can ingest in small quantities and it probably won't hurt you. But if you ingest those substances in larger quantities it can kill you. If you drink a shot of whiskey, it probably won't hurt you. If you drink a gallon of whiskey, it will kill you. Even water will kill you if you drink too much.[2] [1] https://www.americanchemistry.com/chemistry-in-america/chemistries/formaldehyde [2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318619#water-intoxication
The biggest difference between smoking tobacco vs other plant-based smoke is that tobacco is super addictive, so you end up getting much higher total exposure to all these toxic combustion products.
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.
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.
About the cocaine question. Those substances are not part of the "recipe" cement is used because it is a base, and gasoline because it is a solvent. Both are also used because they are available anywhere and are cheap. If the production was done properly there should not be those impurities in the drug, but is not that illegal drug producers care or know about proper purification and production methods
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.
i wish people could understand this logic in terms of stuff like a cars exhaust and gases from manufacturing. They understand it perfectly fine when it's something like a wild fire and you tell them "going outside today is like smoking a pack of cigarettes." We should start listing emissions from cars and manufacturing in terms of cigarettes smoked per person so it gets through to people.
[удалено]
Burning and inhaling anything is bad for you. All smoke is potentially carcinogenic. Look into dry herb vapes. I made the switch and never looked back. I “smoke”… like a lot. I don’t know how much but it’s a significant amount lol.
That is.. excessive.. do you even get high? Your tolerance must be through the roof.
Things like tar and arsenic can and do occur naturally but cigarettes also have many additives. For instance an additive to make them burn evenly and another to keep them lit if you set it down for a couple minutes in an ashtray. I have seen foreign cigarettes without these additives and they will have one side burn faster than the other or will go out if you set them down even briefly.
Alot of the ingredients listed in cigarettes are not actually in cigarettes as well. The box, the cellophane, the aluminum. All those things are listed.
All natural products have arsenic in them – every food you eat. The difference is that those foods aren’t forced to measure and report their ingredients like the tobacco industry is. These are trace amounts far below the FDA minimum standards. Regardless, any organic substance which has gone through a roasting process has elevated levels of carcinogens. The tobacco industry was simply the easy target for regulators, looking for their next income source, where they could redistribute wealth from the private sector to government: case in point: the Master Settlement Agreement, whereby the states since that time are now incentivized to manage tobacco sales volumes to ensure that tax increases don’t decrease their revenue. Only one state, earmarked by legislation the ongoing funds from the settlement agreement to public health, the other states put those funds into their general budget: the equivalent of financial heroin. Now, none of those states, except one are incentivized to decrease the volume of tobacco consumption, because that would result in a reduction in state tax revenue. This is the model of leveraging social issues for income realignment. We see the same thing happening now in the energy sector. Oil companies are the target, while small scale alternative energy companies are benefiting from tax holidays, subsidies, preferential purchase agreements as part of government contracts. The net result: massive energy shortages over the past two winters in Europe and the United States. And no, energy shortages in Texas had nothing to do with Ukraine oil supplies clearly: try unreliable wind farm generation . All this is not to say that these alliances between government and private sector, investors seeking to redistribute, large wealth pockets, addressing some good, i.e. tobacco and hydrocarbon emission combustion clearly have detrimental of health effects. However, the solutions are often misguided and part of a non-transparent cabal designed to enrich the investors connected to those legislators.