The Shocking Ingredients in Cigarettes

If you think cheap cigarettes are simply dried tobacco leaves rolled in paper, you’re about 597 ingredients off. The tobacco industry has become master mixologists with the additives.

Some ingredients are added for flavor, but research has shown that the key purpose of using additives is to improve tobacco’s potency resulting in increased addictiveness–and the additives they choose to use are dreadful.

I remember hearing something about “the list” back in the 1990s when tobacco companies first started being taken to task for their dastardly ways, but seeing the list again now that I’m educated about chemistry and health, I am absolutely staggered. It’s amazing this isn’t in the news everyday. It’s bad enough that many of these ingredients are approved for use in food–but that they haven’t been tested for burning? When burnt, the whole mess results in over 4,000 chemicals, including over 40 known carcinogenic compounds and 400 other toxins. These include nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide, as well as formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT.

You know it’s bad when the Phillip Morris website has this posted on their homepage: Nearly 5,000 chemicals have been identified in tobacco smoke to date. Public health authorities have classified between 45 and 70 of those chemicals, including carcinogens, irritants and other toxins, as potentially causing the harmful effects of tobacco use.

According to Dr. and Mrs. Quit, also known as Lowell Kleinman, M.D., and Deborah Messina-Kleinman, M.P.H., from the Quit Smoking Center, cigarette flavors have gone through many changes since cigarettes were first made. Initially, cigarettes were unfiltered, allowing the full “flavor” of the tar to come through. As the public became concerned about the health effects of smoking, filters were added. While this helped alleviate the public’s fears, the result was a cigarette that tasted too bitter.

The solution to the bitter-tasting cigarette was easy–have some chemists add taste-improving chemicals to the tobacco. But once they got rolling they figured out they could really maximize the whole addiction part, what a hook. They found that a chemical similar to rocket fuel helps keep the tip of the cigarette burning at an extremely hot temperature, which allows the nicotine in tobacco to turn into a vapor so your lungs can absorb it more easily. Or how about ammonia? Adding ammonia to cigarettes allows nicotine in its vapor form to be absorbed through the lungs more quickly. This, in turn, means your brain can get a higher dose of nicotine with each inhalation. Now that’s efficiency.

For a start, here’s the who’s who of the most toxic ingredients used to make cigarettes tastier, and more quickly, effectively addictive:

Ammonia: Household cleaner.
Arsenic: Used in rat poisons.
Benzene: Used in making dyes, synthetic rubber.
Butane: Gas; used in lighter fluid.
Carbon monoxide: Poisonous gas.
Cadmium: Used in batteries.
Cyanide: Lethal poison.
DDT: A banned insecticide.
Ethyl Furoate: Causes liver damage in animals.
Lead: Poisonous in high doses.
Formaldehyde: Used to preserve dead specimens.
Methoprene: Insecticide.
Maltitol: Sweetener for diabetics.
Napthalene: Ingredient in mothballs.
Methyl isocyanate: Its accidental release killed 2000 people in Bhopal, India, in 1984.
Polonium: Cancer-causing radioactive element.

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Mexico’s Tobacco Growers Used as Lobbyists

On October, in chaotic Mexico City, a small army of protestors, sporting placards and shouting into bullhorns, worsened the usual traffic snarl around San Lazaro, the nation’s congressional office complex. Television news accounts showed screaming-mad tobacco farmers, some of whom had boarded buses and traveled 500 miles to warn federal legislators that new taxes on Winston cigarettes would put them out of business.
Inside, lawmakers were in a tug-of-war over a landmark excise tax law that eventually added about 50 cents to a pack of cigarettes and—anti-tobacco activists hoped—would make tobacco less attractive to consumers.
It was not the first time these farmers had traveled far to protest in Mexico. Like tobacco growers around the world, Mexican campesinos—farmers and farmworkers—for years have been deployed to send a message to the public and politicians: Jobs are at stake in the effort by public health advocates to eliminate tobacco ads and limit smoking.
As the global fight over smokers moves from the United States and other countries where tobacco consumption is on the decline, Big Tobacco has drawn a line around developing nations that account for an increasingly important share of their revenues.
From Jakarta in Indonesia to Mexico City, farmers have been reliable street-level lobbyists in the industry’s fight against smoking limits. Farmers say they’re defending their jobs, even though experts insist that the buying habits of multinational companies have more impact on the fortunes of growers than anti-tobacco rules designed by the World Health Organization and public health officials who seek to shrink the human and fiscal costs of tobacco-related disease.
Between 2005 and 2030, 135.1 million people will have died worldwide in developing nations because of smoking-related illness, according to the World Lung Foundation. Tobacco consumption is the globe’s leading preventable cause of death.
In Mexico “the anti-tobacco campaigns didn’t hit farmers as hard as the companies’ global strategies have,” said Javier Castellón, a senator representing western Mexico’s Nayarit state, a swath of humid terrain once known as the Gold Coast because of the value of its tobacco crops.
In Mexico City protests in recent years, farmers have been vocal and proud to stand up for their business, even if some who attended the marches said they’d received stipends for doing so.
In interviews with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, farmers in Nayarit state recalled getting about $20 a day and restaurant and hotel stipends for trips to the nation’s capital. “Many of the ‘farmers’ there were not ,” said one grower, who asked that his name not be used because he fears economic reprisal from tobacco companies.

Big Tobacco in the Third World
Similar relationships between farmers and Big Tobacco are repeated in country after country throughout the developing world—where the industry is seeing impressive revenue growth. British American Tobacco said last year that “some two-thirds of our revenue comes from developing markets.”
One of the industry’s strongest political avatars in developing nations has been the International Tobacco Growers Association. It works in Mexico through local farmers associations. And around the world, ITGA activities mirror those of grower groups here.
In November, tobacco growers protested in Punta del Este, Uruguay, outside a meeting of WHO officials and tobacco-control delegates from around the globe who had gathered to discuss the progress of smoking restrictions and excise tax initiatives. The growers were there to rally against a proposal to ban burley tobacco, used to make flavored cigarettes.
ITGA organized the Uruguay protest. The group says that in 22 countries it represents 85 percent of the world’s tobacco producers. On its website ITGA says it promotes empowerment, understanding and advocacy for tobacco growers and tobacco growing nations around the globe. But the website doesn’t say that ITGA is a Big Tobacco brainchild.
ITGA was formed and funded through a historically tobacco industry-driven research entity, the International Tobacco Information Center, according to internal tobacco corporate documents made available after lawsuits against the industry in the U.S.
One of the benefits of ITGA, listed in a 1988 proposal by John Bloxcidge of INFOTAB, was that the group “could ‘front’ for our third world lobby activities at WHO and gain support from nations hostile to (multinational corporations).”
Former ITGA President Roger Quarles doesn’t deny the group is partially funded by the industry.
“But there’s nothing sinister about it,” he said in an interview with ICIJ. “The companies barely give us enough to get our bills paid. We don’t share in the profit of cigarettes. ”
Tobacco is grown in more than 100 countries. Mexico has declined into a mid-level player, but its leaf still spices the mix in cigarettes manufactured here and abroad.
There’s still abundant consumer demand for tobacco in Mexico: About 16 percent of Mexican adults still smoke, and a growing number of teenagers have tried cigarettes at least once. Because of that, the Mexican public health ministry estimates the country spends $5.7 billion a year providing medical care for tobacco-related illnesses. An estimated 60,000 tobacco-related deaths are reported each year in Mexico.

A rich tobacco tradition
Mexico is also home to the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helú, who is Latin America’s biggest tobacco baron, with a seat on the Philip Morris International board of directors and a stake in the company’s Mexican brands.

Philip Morris and British American Tobacco dominate the cigarette market in Mexico. They´ve been involved in farm production since the late 1990s after the government privatized national tobacco production. BAT eventually purchased Cigarrera La Moderna and Philip Morris increased its shares in Slim’s Cigatam. Other foreign companies now produce tobacco for cigarettes sold abroad.
But in Amapa, in Nayarit state — this was once the center of the Mexican tobacco-farming business— BAT has moved out of its large building and into a smaller office on the outskirts of town. The U.S.-based tobacco leaf vendor Alliance One closed its offices two years ago and liquidated its local assets. A supermarket is being built on land where another company’s reception center was once located.

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Plainly put, cigarette packaging matters

This week our government committed itself to the removal, albeit slowly, of cigarette displays in shops. But plain packaging on cigarettes has been delayed for further consultation.

The Unite union is unimpressed. It represents 6,000 people in tobacco production and distribution, and put out a statement: “Switching to plain packaging will make it easier to sell illicit and unregulated products, especially to young people.” This, the union added, “may increase long-term health problems”.

Tory MP Philip Davies said: “Plain packaging for cigarettes would be gesture politics … it would have no basis in evidence.”

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not, sadly, their own facts. Cigarette packaging has been used for brand-building and sales expansion, and that is bad enough; but it has also been used for many decades to sell the crucial lie that cigarettes which are “light”, “mild”, “silver”, and the rest, are somehow safer.

This is one of the most important con tricks of all time: people base real decisions on it, even though low-tar cigarettes are just as bad for you as normal cigarettes, as we have known for decades. Manufacturers’ gimmicks, like the holes on the filter beside your fingers, confuse laboratory smoking machines, but not people. Smokers who switch to lower-tar brands compensate with larger, faster, deeper inhalations, and by smoking more cigarettes.

The collected data from a million people shows that those who smoke low-tar and “ultra-light” cigarettes get lung cancer at the same rate as people who smoke normal cigarettes. They are also, paradoxically, less likely to give up smoking.

So the “light”, “pale” and “mild” packaging sells a lie. But do people know this? In data from two population-based surveys, a third of smokers believed incorrectly that “light” cigarettes reduce health risks, and were less addictive (it’s 71% in China (pdf)). A random telephone-digit survey of 2,120 smokers found they believed on average that “ultra lights” convey a 33% reduction in risk. A postal survey of 500 smokers found a quarter believed “light” cigarettes are safer. A school-based questionnaire of 267 adolescents found once again, as you’d expect, that they incorrectly believed “light” cigarettes to be healthier and less addictive.

Where do all these incorrect beliefs come from? Careful manipulation by the tobacco industry, as you can see for yourself, in their internal documents available for free online. They explicitly planned to deter quitters with “mild” products, which were made to seem safer and less addictive.

But more than 50 countries, including the UK, have now banned a few magic words like “light” and “mild”. So is that enough? No. A survey of 15,000 people in four countries (pdf) found that after the UK ban, there was a brief dip in false beliefs, but by 2005 we bounced back to having the same false beliefs about “safer-looking” brands as the US.

This is because brand packaging continues to peddle these lies. A street-interception survey (pdf) from 2009 of 300 smokers and 300 non-smokers found that people think packages with “smooth” and “silver” in the names are safer, and that cigarettes in packaging with lighter colour, and a picture of a filter, were also safer.

Of course tobacco companies know this (pdf). As the Philip Morris tobacco company said in an internal document, entitled Marketing New Products in a Restrictive Environment: “Lower delivery products tend to be featured in blue packs. Indeed, as one moves down the delivery sector, then the closer to white a pack tends to become. This is because white is generally held to convey a clean, healthy association.”

If you’re in doubt of the impact this can have, “brand imagery” studies show that when participants smoke the exact same cigarettes presented in lighter coloured packs, or in packs with “mild” in the name, they rate the smoke as lighter and less harsh, simply through the power of suggestion. These illusory perceptions of mildness, of course, further reinforce the false belief that the cigarettes are healthier.

But these aren’t the only reasons why banning a few words from packaging isn’t enough. A study of 600 adolescents, for example, found that plain packages increase the noticeability, recall, and credibility of warning labels.

There’s no real doubt that the extended, complex, interlocking branding and packaging machinations of cigarette companies play a big role in misleading smokers about the risks, by downplaying them, and sadly nothing from Unite – for shame – or some Tory MP will change that.

If you don’t care about this evidence, or you think jobs are more important than people killed by cigarettes, or you think libertarian principles are more important than both, then that’s a different matter. But if you say the evidence doesn’t show evidence of harm from branded packaging, you are simply wrong.

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