Are Cigarettes Safe?

Are Cigarettes Safe?


Native Americans who lived before Columbus used tobacco in pipes and for shamanic rites to make them hallucinate. When Christopher Columbus came back from North America, the locals gave him tobacco. He then brought it to Europe.

Europeans didn't start using tobacco a lot until the middle of the 16th century. Explorers and diplomats like Jean Nicot from France (who nicotine was named after) made it popular.

In 1556, tobacco came to France; in 1558, it came to Portugal; in 1559, it came to Spain; and in 1565, it came to England.

At first, tobacco was made for chewing, snuff, and smoking pipes. Since the early 1600s, people have been making cigarettes by hand, but they didn't become popular in America until after the Civil War. In 1883, James Bonsack invented the cigarette rolling machine as part of a contest sponsored by the tobacco company Allen and Ginter. They awarded $75,000 to the first person to make a rapid cigarette-rolling machine. This led to a huge rise in cigarette sales. This made it easier for cigarettes to be made in large quantities and sent out to many places.

Since then, nicotine addiction has become a problem for public health in almost every country on Earth.

Warnings about the health consequences of smoking were not very loud until the 1950s and 1960s, when a series of lawsuits that didn't work brought the matter to the public's attention. The plaintiff wouldn't win a lawsuit until the 1990s. The American Surgeon General initially called for warning labels on cigarette packets in 1966, nevertheless.

There are poisons in cigarettes, such tar and nicotine, and there are also poisons like arsenic that are used to cure them. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin or cocaine, and it has effects on the brain's dopamine circuits that endure a long time. There are four types of substances that the filters try to get rid of: nitrosamines, which are thought to be the most cancer-causing substances in tobacco smoke; aldehydes, which are made when sugars and cellulose in tobacco burn; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which form in the cigarette behind the burning tip; and trace amounts of heavy metals from fertilizers used to grow the plant.

Tobacco corporations didn't want to publicly declare that they knew their product was dangerous, but they made "safer" filtered cigarettes as a method to appease people who were against tobacco.

In 1958, a Philip Morris scientist even said in public, "Evidence is building up that heavy smoking contributes to lung cancer." He brilliantly argued that this revelation could be used as a "wealth of ammunition" to attack the competition by saying that Philip Morris created cigarettes with filters to screen out the poisons, unlike its competitors. Patrick Sheehy, the CEO of British American Tobacco, had a different view in 1986. He wrote, "If you try to make a 'safe' cigarette, you are, by implication, in danger of being seen as accepting that the current product is unsafe, and I don't think we should take this position."

No matter how hard tobacco executives tried to keep the public from knowing how dangerous their product was, the growing demand for cigarettes made it necessary for all companies to make some filter devices for their cigarettes. In 1950, only 1% of cigarette sales were for filtered cigarettes. By 1975, this number had risen to 87%.

But there were two problems with making filtered cigarettes: one was health-related and the other was a question of personal taste. Smokers will keep smoking until they have the nicotine they need because they are addicted to it. If you give them a filter that takes out nicotine, they'll just take deeper breaths or smoke more cigarettes. A filter that takes out the tar in tobacco will take away the taste and feel of smoking that smokers are used to. Consumers say that such a product is "flavorless." Because smokers change their behavior to make up for the chemicals they take in, the amount of toxins they take in is not much lower than with an unfiltered cigarette, and there is no proof that filtered cigarettes are less harmful to health.

Still, tobacco corporations are trying to make filters that work better. They are often held back not by a lack of technical expertise but by how others act. In 1975, Brown and Williamson came up with a new cigarette called Fact. It included a new filter that was made to get rid of harmful chemicals like cyanide. But customers didn't like the product, therefore it was taken off the market two years later.

There are 425,000 hits when you search for "cigarette filter patent" on the internet. This is because cigarette companies are trying to outdo each other in making filter materials and baffles that make cigarettes that they say are less harmful but yet taste good to users.

It is hard to build a filter that removes tar but not nicotine. To satisfy smokers' nicotine addiction with less exposure to tar, tobacco corporations are currently focusing on cultivating tobacco plants with more nicotine. People have been quite upset over rumors that cigarette corporations "spike" their products with extra nicotine because cigarettes are presented as a natural agricultural product.

Scientists have also tried using tobacco replacements, including wood pulp, which would make smoking taste better without as much tar. Legal problems have stopped these kinds of projects because they are no longer "natural" but rather a substance that is developed in a lab and is being used to make health claims. It takes a long time for these kinds of items to get through the regulatory process before they can be sold. In a competitive market, it's cheaper and more profitable for tobacco corporations to change organically grown tobacco leaf.

A cigarette is primarily a way to get nicotine, which is an addictive drug. So, in theory, it is conceivable to make a product that only includes nicotine and no tar. There is indeed a product like this: the nicotine patch. At its most basic level, it does the same thing as a cigarette. But it doesn't have as much social status as the smoking-related packaging, rituals, and other items; it's for those who wish to quit smoking.

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