you know where I bet would be the worst place to have a heart attack? during a game of charades.

[the_siobhan]

Anybody who spends any time hanging out with me knows that I am brutally allergic to cigarettes. Over the last ten years my allergy and my asthma has gotten to the point where I can't be near the stuff at all - even the stale smoke coming off the clothes of somebody I'm sitting next to can have my lungs contracting in protest.

But I don't react nearly as strongly to pipe or cigarette smoke. If I get it blown in face I get about the same amount of a reaction as I would to getting a face full of street dust. In fact I've smoked the odd cigar and enjoyed it. Which leads me to believe that I'm not actually allergic to tobacco, but to something in the curing process or additives that are specific to cigarettes.

A few years ago there was an anti-smoking ad that showed a couple of teenagers diving into an oily-looking pool while a text-over listed all the toxic ingredients that are found in cigarettes. Tar. Formaldehyde. Ammonia. Now I don't know how many of those things are also found in other tobacco products or are just a by-product of burning leaves and twigs and bug-poo and sucking them into your lungs, but it's a well-known fact that cigarette manufacturers add all kinds of glop specifically intended to make the things more addictive.

And I gotta wonder, why do we let them?

Everybody knows quitting smoking is hard, whether you've actually ever smoked or not. At this point I think I've still known more people who have successfully quite heroin or cocaine than I've know people who have successfully quit smoking, and it's not like I've spent a lot of time hanging around with illegal drug users in the last decade. Yet we still allow manufactures to lace their product with toxic chemicals that are specifically designed to make it harder.

Given the amount of money that we fork over through our taxes on health care, wouldn't it make more sense to tell the cigarette companies to knock that shit off and stop trying to poison us?

And maybe if they did I'd be able to sit next to my friends on a bar patio again.

Comments

[the_axel]

You led me to as the interwebs. It turns out that Tobacco companies have been allowed to be really, really secretive.

But Massachusetts recently passed a law requiring that tobacco companies list their ingredients, and one company has actually done so without dragging it through the courts for years.

Here it is - all 599.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

That's... pretty impressive.

[eveofdstruction.livejournal.com]

I'm really surprised at how many of the identifiable ingredients are flavoring agents. Good quality tobacco tastes pretty good on it's own. Not that I think for a minute that most cigarettes contain good quality tobacco.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

The few times I've smoked cigars they've tasted pretty good. I think I've smoked a cigarette once in my life and it tasted like burnt asscrack.

[the-fury.livejournal.com]

There are some high quality roll your own tobaccos that are really good. You pretty much have to go to a tobaccanist for them though.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Actually one of the interesting things about that article is that the flavours are mostly added to counteract the bitterness caused by the filters - which don't do shit to protect your lungs. And since they are usually made out of fiberglass they are the major non-biodegradable part of the cigarette and probably a carcinogen in their own right.