The Tobacco Cartel must be amazed at how easily they’ve been able to slide vaping and e-cigarettes past virtually the entire anti-smoking anti-Tobacco coalition. Of course they get no credit for innovation – the vaping thing happened almost totally without the Cartel’s involvement, coming straight out of the Cannabis space, but they knew a great thing immediately and got onto co-opting it early and hard. The Tobacco Cartel loves the idea of selling flavored industrial nicotine to vapers and e-cig puffers instead of having to go to all the trouble of making combustable tobacco products.
In spite of the Tobacco Cartel singing the praises of vaping and e-cigs, which really ought to raise a few suspicions, evidently almost everyone who hates tobacco and smoking professionally (always conflating the two) agrees that having kids inhale nicotine by vaping it or using e-cigs is safer & better than having them smoke what everyone believes – or pretends to believe – are tobacco cigarettes. CDC, FDA, Truth Initiative, TobaccoFreeKids, all the players agree, with suitable reluctance for public consumption, that it’s better to have kids vaping pure nicotine than smoking cigarettes.
So – let’s fact-check this – if inhaling nicotine is sort of OK, but smoking tobacco cigarettes is definitely not OK, then it must be the tobacco that is definitely not OK – right? I mean, smoking cigarettes means smoking the tobacco plus inhaling the nicotine on the tobacco leaves, right? Cigarettes are made of tobacco, and tobacco contains nicotine.
But we know, because we’re told so, that smoking tobacco is harmful, dangerous, and deadly – right? So ‘smoking tobacco’ and ‘smoking cigarettes’ must be synonymous – right?
Well actually the fact is that we know nothing about the health consequences of smoking tobacco.
That’s because none of the decades-long research on smoking and health has actually investigated the health consequences of inhaling tobacco smoke. Pure Tobacco has never been tested in all the government-funded studies on the health effects of smoking. All government and private research on ‘smoking & health’ has used “Kentucky Reference” research cigarettes supplied to researchers worldwide since the 1970s by the Tobacco Cartel itself. The tobacco in these “Reference Standard cigarettes” has been contaminated with bioactive chemical contaminants, including globally banned fungicides and insecticides, that have not been disclosed to the researchers and have skewed 100% of the “tobacco smoke” and “cigarette smoke” data with significant concealed confounding variables. Pesticides like these.
Every research scientist and doctor in the world doing smoking and health research has been deliberately led to believe, or simply permitted to conclude (if they ever doubted) that they were studying the health consequences of smoking tobacco. Scientists involved in smoking and health research worldwide have assumed that the standardized cigarettes that the Tobacco Cartel supplied to them for their scientific studies were tobacco cigarettes and that Kentucky Reference cigarette smoke and tobacco smoke are the same thing. Except they aren’t – not at all.
These “scientific’ research cigs, which in the early 1970s the Cartel began supplying to researchers through the front of a respected tobacco country university, have always been presented to researchers, and accepted without question by them, as standardized tobacco cigarettes, and much is made that these research cigs are specially manufactured with none of those suspicious ‘additives’ or other flavoring chemicals to mess up the results. Yes sir, these cigs are suitable for every kind of smoking research – courtesy of the Tobacco Cartel, in the interests of pure science.
But there’s a huge hidden problem. Major confounding variables in the form of highly bioactive insecticide and fungicide chemicals have been present in these University of Kentucky “Research Cigarettes” since the beginning, and have never once been documented, revealed, or accounted for. Beginning with the first Kentucky Reference cigarettes in the 1970s, the commercial tobacco supply from which they are drawn has been heavily contaminated by every class of pesticide in succession – first the organochlorines of the 1950s, which began phasing out in the 1980s; next the orgaqnophosphates beginning in the 1970s and extending through the 1990s; then the carbamates, and the pyrethrins, and now the neonicotinoids and other exotic classes – all used heaving on tobacco, all contaminating every reference cigarettes as well as every commercial cigarette. The “Kentucky Reference Cigarettes” that have been used in every research study since the 1970s are and always have been contaminated with highly bioactive pesticide residues that have known health consequences due to exposure by any route, let alone by chronic, daily inhalation in aerosolized, partially combusted, and dry distilled forms, but this universal contamination has never once been mentioned or accounted for in any research cigarettes supplied by the Cartel to researchers worldwide. Hard to believe? Check this out.
None of the tens of thousands of researchers since the 1970s have known that these confounding variables were present in the reference cigarettes they were using and were skewing every set of data on cigarettes, cigarette smoke, and so-called “Tobacco smoke extract” (TSE) which is actually Kentucky Reference Cigarette smoke extract – not the same thing at all. Before about 1970 there was plenty of research on actual cigarettes that people were smoking – you can browse a few examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research that virtually ended in the 1970s here and here and here and here and here.
Just in case you think maybe we shouldn’t get excited about tiny doses of pesticide residues in cigarettes, check this research that says today’s pesticides don’t depend on brute force firepower like the good old days; instead they use molecular stealth to get the job done.
“Toxic effects of pesticide mixtures at a molecular level: their relevance to human health”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22728724/
For another perspective on how this decades-long concealment works, please check the US Surgeon General’s “Warnings”. One of these four warnings are mandated by federal regulations to be on every pack of cigarettes.
Warning 1: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy
Warning 2: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.
Warning 3: Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Birth Weight.
Warning 4: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.
See “Tobacco” mentioned anywhere here?
Think that’s accidental? An oversight maybe?
If so, then you must not be familiar with how many high-priced pairs of eyeballs look at language like this before it goes public. So why would the US government and the Tobacco Cartel want to avoid saying that “Tobacco” did all this harm and instead deliberately use “smoking” and ‘cigarette’?
If the Feds and the Anti-Smoking and anti-Tobacco forces all agree with the Tobacco Cartel that smoking cigarettes is worse than the inhaling straight nicotine, and if the Surgeon General is avoiding the mention of Tobacco in every single “warning”, so isn’t the Surgeon General telling us, by logical inference, that smoking pure, organic Tobacco cigarettes without pesticide contaminants would be better than either/both (1) inhaling pesticides in contaminated cigarettes or (2) vaping industrial nicotine.
The FDA has tried to head off any discussion of this by forcing the manufacturers of American Spirit organic tobacco cigarettes to warn innocent, gullible citizens that organic cigarettes are not a safer smoke.
Good thing nobody is forcing FDA to say “not safer than what?” because the answer would have to be “smoking tobacco without inhaling any pesticides is not any safer than smoking tobacco and inhaling pesticides that are known to be hazardous to human health, which we’ve been allowing smokers to do full-on for over 50 years and not said one word about it. All while being extremely well-paid, considering our mediocre talents, with secure pensions and guaranteed consulting jobs after we retire as Federal regulators.”
It’s pretty simple to see full evidence of a federal government/tobacco cartel conspiracy to conceal material facts about the dangers of smoking contaminated cigarettes by carefully-crafted omissions, and the use of very deliberately crafted very misleading statements. All the evidence you’ll ever need is right there on any pack of Marlboros or any other brand – concealing any inference or trace of the 100% avoidable dangers inside.
When you see ‘Trace” in this list, please keep in mind that this simply means the chemical is present at the limits of detection and has nothing to do with the potential for danger that this level of exposure represents. Please also keep in mind that we can be certain that there are numerous similarly dangerous fungicides and insecticides lurking below the limits of detection but still full of bioactive threat potential.
So, here’s a fun way to do a little medical forensics yourself. Remember – this has never been done and published in any research journal, so you’ll be a pioneer, but it’s so simple. Anyone can play this really fun little forensic detective game. Simply pick one of the insecticides or fungicides in any of these brands and Google that pesticide’s name plus things like “diabetes”, “breast cancer”, “birth defect”, “autism”, “obesity”, “neuropathy”, “sperm”, and “pregnancy’”. You won’t hit every time but I guarantee you’ll hit often enough to make the point.
Then if you really like playing the game, you can get a complete list of the pesticides I found in 5 brands of tobacco products in my book “Smoke No Evil”, along with a rather detailed look at the research that pops up when you begin looking.
It’s amazing to find the hidden surprises in those Marlboros, or Camels, or Swisher Sweets little cigars, or American Spirit “natural” Blues. Check what comes up, for example, when you Google “DDT” and “genetic” or “fetal”, or “epigenetic”. Swisher Sweets are loaded with DDT and millions of young women smoke them.
So, let’s check out Marlboros. see that bifenthrin near the top of the list? That 0.870 mg/kg concentration translates to roughly 6-8 nanograms of pure bifenthrin that will enter the smokestream ahead of the burning cigarette coal, then on into the smoker’s lungs and into the smoker’s bloodstream. That’s with each cigarette. Remember dose or concentration may not matter in the initiation of disease processes, especially if that doseage level is being maintained by a pack or so a day.
From the lungs into the blood, and then onward to the testicles, if the smoker is a Marlboro cowboy. (We’ll get to Marlboro Mommies in a minute.)
Why should cowboys care? Check this warning to cattle breeders:
“A commonly used insecticide ingredient may depress semen quality if used on bulls too close to breeding season, research says”
https://www.beefmagazine.com/genetics/common-insecticide-may-affect-bull-fertility
Guess what “commonly used insecticide” needs to be kept away from your prize bulls balls cowboy. So be sure to smoke downwind of the herd, if you’re gonna keep smoking Marlboros. Sorry about that, stud. Or, you could switch to organic tobacco cigarettes, but would a real cowboy do that?
But – oh wait! It’s not just bulls and cowboys that might want to avoid the bifenthrin. Looks like it’s the unborn too – at least unborn baby Zebrafish.
“Collectively, bifenthrin induced developmental toxicity, inflammatory cell death and anti-angiogenesis during embryogenesis.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31734314/
But wait again! That research is only about little fish babies being affected by bifenthrin. So no worries for the unborn children of Marlboro Mommies – right?
Hmmm – actually since bifenthrin has never been tested for what might happen when its being inhaled by Marlboro Mommies, we can’t say for sure that bifenthrin in your Marlboros will lead to a miscarriage or to birth defects, like with those teeny Zebrafish. We only know about bifenthrin does to bull sperm and unborn baby fish – so far. And by the way, scientists use Zebrafish because what happens to them is a pretty good proxy for what can happen to mammals. Like us.
But unfortunately even if it turns out that Bifenthrin only kills baby fish, Marlboro Mommies aren’t home free yet because then there’s that Metalaxyl. Looks like it gets right in there and targets the pregnant Marlboro smoker’s cord connecting her to the baby in her womb. Wonder what Metalaxyl is doing to all those little rapidly-dividing and developing cells in there? This research isn’t on bull balls or baby fish – this is relevant to what is actually happening right now inside the umbilical cord connecting every Marlboro Mommy to her unborn baby – the metalaxyl is coming.
Cytotoxicity and genotoxicity of methomyl, carbaryl, metalaxyl, and pendimethalin in human umbilical vein endothelial cells
11 January 2021
https://doi.org/10.1002/jat.4139
“This is a first study on HUVECs (human umbilical vein endothelial cells) signifying the cytotoxic–genotoxic and apoptotic potential of carbamate insecticides (methomyl and carbaryl), fungicide (metalaxyl), and herbicide (pendimethalin).”
I guess the bottom line in this ledger of horrors is that there’s not a single one of the fungicides and pesticides I found in tobacco products that is without severe potential for human health impact through inhalation, and many of them are already proven dangerous and harmful through other routes of exposure – dermal & ingestion mostly. Have none of them have ever been tested for their impact when inhaled by humans because who could have imagined that the pesticides being used on tobacco crops might have a health impact when that contaminated tobacco was turned into cigarettes? Somehow that possibility was so universally discounted that not a single study on the subject has ever been run.
Also, pesticides themselves are never tested before being approved for use for their effects when inhaled in sub-chronic doses, like for instance by hundreds of millions of smokers worldwide. Not an insignificant level of pesticide exposure, wouldn’t you say? Don’t you find that it is a little strange that not one regulatory authority in the US, or apparently the world, is taking any steps at all to acknowledge or investigate much less deal with this 100% preventable public health threat? An awful lot of money has been spent on ‘research’, and a lot of lives have been lost, and there hasn’t been one single study. Looks like FDA and EPA and USDA and others have some explaining to do.
It’s not like FDA doesn’t have the authority. It is given in the 2009 FAMILY SMOKING PREVENTION AND TOBACCO CONTROL ACT
Section 4 of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act (15 U.S.C. 1333), as amended by sections 201 and 202, is further amended by adding at the end the following:
‘‘(e) TAR, NICOTINE, AND OTHER SMOKE CONSTITUENT DISCLOSURE.—
‘‘(3) CIGARETTE AND OTHER TOBACCO PRODUCT CONSTITUENTS.—
In addition to the disclosures required by paragraph (1), the Secretary may, under a rulemaking conducted under section 553 of title 5, United States Code, prescribe disclosure requirements regarding the level of any cigarette or other tobacco product constituent including any smoke constituent.
Any such disclosure may be required if the Secretary determines that disclosure would be of benefit to the public health, or otherwise would increase consumer awareness of the health consequences of the use of tobacco products, except that no such prescribed disclosure shall be required on the face of any cigarette package or advertisement.
Nothing in this section shall prohibit the Secretary from requiring such prescribed disclosure through a cigarette or other tobacco product package or advertisement insert, or by any other means under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
Meanwhile, if you or anyone you love is a smoker, here’s my thought of the day for you or for them: you can quit smoking commercial cigarettes, that everybody agrees are terrible for you, and you can keep smoking tobacco, as you enjoy doing, and you can even enjoy it more, simply by switching to organic tobacco cigarettes. Or you can switch to making RYO organic tobacco cigarettes with whole cured organic tobacco leaf -easily available online.
USDA Certified Organic tobacco is safer and healthier to smoke than insecticide and fungicide-contaminated tobacco. Duh. How much safer? We don’t know. Whatever tobacco may or may not do to the smoker, we do have a pretty good idea of what inhaling insecticides and fungicides probably does, even though somehow nobody has ever gotten around to comparing the health effects of smoking tobacco with & without pesticide contaminants. The excuse – if you can believe this – is that smoking tobacco is so dangerous that we don’t have to bother looking at the pesticides. Multiple government agencies say this in print, over and over through the past 50 years, yet there has never once been a study comparing the health effects of smoking pesticides with smoking pure tobacco. This is purely a political statement, not a scientific or even a moral one.
We know what many of the fungicides and insecticides do by other routes and we know that dose doesn’t matter for many of them – a few molecules are enough to damage fetal life or kick off breast or testicular cancer processes or damage DNA for future generations.
A simple switch to organic tobacco cigarettes means you will be able to enjoy smoking safely and pleasurably regardless of what the authorities and the Cartel want you to believe. Ask yourself – why would the government go to all that trouble to make the only cigarette brand without pesticides, the only USDA organic tobacco brand, say on its packs that organic tobacco is not a safer smoke? Why would a government agency like CDC publish reams of data on pesticide exposure and then say that pesticide contaminants in cigarettes don’t matter enough to even consider them as a possible source of preventable harm from smoking cigarettes?
If you smoke, just try this. Just switch to smoking organic cigarettes. Either American Spirit ready-rolls or RYO with organic – NOT JUST “NATURAL” – tobacco. You don’t have to stop smoking to be safer, healthier and more natural. Recognize that you’ve been allowing your (and everybody else’s) unquestioning belief in a bunch of smooth lies keep you from just trying it yourself. Switch to organic tobacco – cigarettes or RYO. Stay with it for 30 days and long before those 30 days are up you’ll know. This is one simple choice will change your life and the lives of everyone who loves you. You’ll not only feel better, but you’ll find that you’re in control of your smoking. Many, many organic tobacco smokers say they now smoke way less than a pack a day – many say only 3-4 do it for them.
And with some great CBD Cannabis Hemp cigarettes coming on the market now a lot of smokers are starting the day with an organic tobacco cigarette, then pacing themselves with a few CBD cigarettes during the day, and then maybe one or two more tobacco cigarettes in the evening. It’s a whole different way to approach doing what every addicted cigarette smokers wants to do – quit!
But to quit what most smokers really want to quit – the sick feelings and the cravings and the addiction. Most smokers don’t actually want to quit smoking because they like it, and with organic pesticide-free tobacco they don’t have to until and if they want to. I’ve written a short little book “The Three Step Natural Tobacco Path To Freedom From Cigarettes” if you would like to read what others have found when they switched to organic tobacco cigarettes.
I believe that its quite possible that unbiased research, which would be simple and inexpensive to plan and conduct, would find that smoking organic tobacco cigarettes in moderation and with an otherwise healthy lifestyle is perfectly safe in the context of a normal life.
For the immediate present, how much of the worldwide impact on health from smoking contaminated tobacco products, what percentage of the actual harm, can be immediately alleviated by individual smokers switching to an organic tobacco cigarette?
Nobody has to quit smoking – at least not at first. Simply switching to an organic cigarette that doesn’t contain insecticides and fungicides for 30 days will change any smoker’s life enough that they will understand what was happening to them previously, and will finally be able to make smoking decisions for themselves including tapering down and quitting.
That’s all it takes. If you smoke anything but organic tobacco cigarettes now, and if you’ve ever wanted to quit, try switching for one month and see for yourself what happens to your cravings, your habit, and your addiction. If you think that just switching to a cigarette that doesn’t dose you with a pesticide cocktail every puff isn’t going to change your life then you’re in for a very pleasant surprise. It’s a surprise that immense amounts of Federal and private dollars are being spent to keep you from discovering – that it’s not the Tobacco that’s been your problem all along. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying Tobacco. Tobacco in moderation will not harm you.
By the way, it’s not the additives you need to worry about in those conventional cigarettes either – those are an intentional distraction, a “red herring’ that works incredibly well. How much debate do we need to have about mint being used to attract Black smokers when their Swisher Sweets are dosing them with DDT and Carbendazim – which apparently the FDA doesn’t care about enough to mention?
Still, the whole “additives’ thing seems to have kept the anti-tobacco hounds baying at shadows and off the scent for generations, along with that silly list of ‘7000 chemicals’ they all love to tout – as if the number of chemicals in the smoke of any burning plant matter doesn’t emit thousands of compounds. That is propaganda masquerading as science, just like the entire edifice of government and private anti-smoking, anti-tobacco lies and deception, funded by the Tobacco Cartel, serving the purposes of the Tobacco Cartel, and crafted to such perfection that it can all be done in plain sight with nobody noticing. Amazing.
panaceachronicles 