Recent Harvard Medical School research that shows that for every 10 nanograms of DDT per gram of serum in a pregnant woman’s blood her chances of a so-called spontaneous abortion rise 17%.
“…there was a linear trend of increasing odds of early pregnancy losses with increasing serum total DDT concentration”
In this post I’ll show you how easily young women who smoke Swisher Sweets, who are predominantly Black & Latina, will reach many times that level of DDT in their blood after only a few weeks of smoking one or two Swisher Sweets little cigars a day, and will reach the same levels after smoking a couple of cannabis blunts every day rolled using Swisher Sweets.
I’ll occasionally mention but not focus on the other pesticides these young smokers are inhaling, having covered many of those pesticides and their known hazards in other posts.
Any young woman regularly smoking Swisher Sweets who gets pregnant after having smoked them for a while, even if she stops smoking before getting pregnant, remains at risk. The DDT that remains stored in her tissues and blood from every past little cigar will find her baby when it is invisibly small, not yet detectable, and that baby’s life will be at much higher risk of being ended. In this post I’ll link you to the research. I’ll also show you, using hard data and published science, how we know that with a DDT concentration of 0.816 mg/kg, every 2 gram Swisher Sweets little cigar transfers a total of +/-1600 nanograms of DDT into the inhaled smoke stream, some of which is then bioavailable to the smoker each time they inhale.
The math here is pretty simple. 1 mg = 1 million nanograms, so 0.816 mg = 816,000 nanograms. If there is 816,000 nanograms of DDT in a kilogram (1000 grams) of Swisher Sweets then there are 816 nanograms of DDT per gram of Swisher Sweets. In a 2 gram Swisher there will be 1632 nanograms of DDT. The science we’ll look at later shows that roughly 30 % of the DDT in tobacco transfers to the inhaled smoke, with almost all being absorbed and not exhaled as secondhand smoke. So with every Swisher Sweet little cigar, the smoker will be inhaling and absorbing approximately 3-400 nanograms of DDT.
Since we know that an average young woman age 15-29 has 300-400 grams of serum in her 5 liters or so of blood, and since we know that DDT is highly bio-accumulative, it’s easy to see that it would only take a few weeks for a young daily Swisher Sweets smoker to reach and then exceed that 10 nanograms per gram of serum level where “spontaneous” abortion becomes increasingly likely.
As you may know, DDT has been banned worldwide since 1972, so it may sound strange that it’s being inhaled in the smoke of Swisher Sweets by tens or even hundreds of thousands of pregnant young women, mainly young Black and Hispanic women, every day.
For openers, check out the data below from my 2019 book “Smoke No Evil” and notice that DDT concentration. I’ll discuss its significance as we go through the published science below, but for now please simply take note of that 0.816 mg/kg DDT level in Swisher Sweets.
Solid demographic data says that roughly two million young women, the great majority from African-American, Latin American and Native American communities, either smoke Swisher Sweets regularly, or regularly smoke blunts rolled with them, which puts these young smokers at high and totally unrecognized risk of spontaneous abortion. or “miscarriage”, early in any pregnancy now or in the future.
This is not a small or isolated issue, and although the US government is fully aware of this DDT contamination, regulators have done nothing to warn pregnant smokers or to regulate DDT or any of the other pesticide teratogens that contaminate tobacco products. They warn endlessly about “tobacco smoking”, and they’re hysterical over menthol, but FDA never mentions the pesticides, which includes DDT and dozens of others, that they know contaminate all tobacco products, and almost all recreational cannabis, and that are by far the most dangerous threat to unborn children of smokers. Whatever the risks posed by combusting and inhaling the smoke of tobacco leaf and cannabis flower, those risks must pale in comparison to the known threats posed by inhaling multiple pesticides dozens or even hundreds of times a day. And there are plenty of young women and their developing children at that level of risk.
“Cigar and Marijuana Blunt Use Among Pregnant and Nonpregnant Women of Reproductive Age in the United States, 2006–2016”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6050836/
“Tobacco smoking during pregnancy is the leading preventable cause of poor pregnancy outcomes in the United States and a major public health issue.”
“Research on smoking during pregnancy focuses primarily on cigarette smoking, with little emphasis on cigars or blunts (partially or entirely hollowed out cigar wrappers containing marijuana). The examination of cigar smoking during pregnancy is increasingly important, because cigar sales have increased by 51% between 2008 and 2015, prompting some to regard it as an ignored public health threat.”
“Similarly, the use of marijuana is increasing, especially among reproductive-aged women. Increases in cigar smoking and in smoking of blunts (i.e., smoking both tobacco and marijuana) could potentially affect maternal and child health.”
We know that hundreds of thousands of current female Swisher Sweet smokers will get pregnant at least once before they are 30. Strong data also suggest that roughly 500,000 of these smokers will lose a baby by miscarriage at least once before age 30, and many won’t even know it because it will happen in the first few weeks of pregnancy. It probably isn’t a surprise that’s the stage when DDT is most effective at destroying the rapidly dividing cells of developing life is early in the pregnancy.
As I mentioned earlier, this might seem academic if you’re aware that DDT has been banned worldwide for nearly 70 years, so you might ask how a pregnant girl or woman could possibly be exposed to enough DDT to cause her to lose her baby? And how could this be happening to so many young women without anyone being aware of it?
I’ll show you exactly how this is happening right now and why a single Tobacco product, Swisher Sweets, smoked every day in America by hundreds of thousands of young girls and women, mainly Black and Brown and poor, has very likely causing hundreds of thousands of these deceptively named “Spontaneous Abortions” for many years. This is mass poisoning caused by, at best, the extreme greed and negligence of the manufacturer and by knowing and deliberate dereliction of duty by legislators and regulators.
This destruction of unborn human life isn’t spontaneous at all. The DDT contaminating this one brand alone, not to mention all the other nerve, hormone, and DNA toxins present, is a crime against people on the same scale as any war of aggression or genocide.
The crime being committed here is happening in what history shows us is the most invisible of all places – in plain sight. And it’s even all dressed up and looking cute.
The hard data you saw above and will see again demonstrates that every Swisher Sweet little cigar a young girl or woman smokes, and every blunt they roll and smoke, delivers approximately 400 nanograms of DDT to their blood, where it’s absorbed and transported by her blood across the placenta and into the nerves and tissues of her developing child. Because DDT is so persistent in her body, the amount of illegal, banned worldwide DDT in one Swisher Sweet a day can radically increase her chances of miscarrying the baby before she even knows she’s pregnant or, maybe even more tragic, can result in a mentally and physically damaged child at birth. See any hint of that danger. in these images?
And by the way, that same amount of DDT will also very likely make her and her surviving children and grandchildren obese because DDT is a poweful trans-generational obesogen.
Oxidative Phosphorylation Impairment by DDT and DDE
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2019.00122/full
“Although the mitotoxicity of DDT and DDE was established 20–40 years ago, it was not viewed in the light of the diseases faced today; therefore, it is prudent to reexamine the mitotoxicity literature for mechanistic support of DDT and DDE as causal contributors to obesity and diabetes, as well as associated diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.”
That DDT she’s inhaling will also raise her odds, and her daughter’s and granddaughter’s odds, of developing breast cancer and diabetes especially if she is African-American, Latin American, or Native American.
And so as not to ignore Swisher Sweet’s cancer threat to her sons, let me note that male children who are exposed to DDT before birth have a much higher risk of testicular cancer among many other similarly nasty outcomes.
This public health atrocity is totally under the radar. Not a single public health authority seems to be aware of or addressing this threat. Nobody in the African American, Latin American or Native American communities seems to be aware of this connection, yet many people are acutely aware of its terrible consequences – mysteriously high rates of birth defects, miscarriages, developmental problems, and childhood diseases of all kinds plague every marginalized community with asthma, diabetes, obesity, learning problems. Countless little lives ruined from the outset – for what? So greedy manufacturers can produce tobacco cheaply in corrupt countries where DDT can be used heavily on valuable tobacco crops in spite of a worldwide ban on this highly neurotoxic, endocrine disrupting, and DNA damaging substance.
Could DDT and of course other pesticides in all tobacco products at least partly explain why so many young women in marginalized communities, where sweet, fruity and minty smokes are so heavily promoted, and where cheap, heavily contaminated tobacco products have been dumped for decades, suffer such high rates of spontaneous abortion and miscarriage?
The danger from the DDT alone is clear: there are multiple pathways by which just DDT alone damages and destroys human life at its early stages, and lots of impeccable scientific resources say the same. But as real as the danger from DDT, smokers on all conventional brands of tobacco products are inhaling a toxic stew of pesticides, not simply DDT.
So, here’s that hard data again. Tests I conducted for “Smoke No Evil” showed that Swisher Sweets were contaminated with 0.816 mg/kg of DDT, and a lot more. That is an incredibly high DDT number – nearly 700X the concentrated exposure from any other consumer product in the world.
And here’s that simple math again. That 0.816 mg/kg you can see in the “Smoke No Evil” tests translates to 816,000 nanograms per kilogram (1000 grams) of Swisher Sweets.
Since each little cigar is about 2 grams, that translates to 1632 nanograms of DDT that are potentially bioavailable to the smoker each time they smoke.
After combustion and inhalation, studies from the 1960s (before such research disappeared) show that approximately 30% of the total DDT present in cigarettes is inhaled and absorbed by the smoker. So we can reasonably say that smokers are absorbing @300-400 nanograms of the total DDT in each Swisher Sweet they smoke, and that amount will enter the bloodstream of the smoker. From there we know that DDT circulates to the umbilical cord and placenta, where it crosses over into the blood of the developing infant unimpeded by biological barriers.
Placental transfer of pesticides studied in human placental perfusion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7689789/
“This study demonstrates the potential of pesticides to be transferred across placenta into the foetal circulation, and the ability of the placenta to produce metabolites, exposing the mother and foetus to both parent compounds and their metabolites.”
The following 1976 study is one of the last ever published, but even though it’s almost 50 years old the data on DDT transfer rates into the cigarette smoke stream are as clear and as relevant in 2023 as they were in 1976.
“The transfer of DDT-TDE residues to mainstream smoke has been the subject of several investigations. Generally, 12 to 18% of the p,p’-DDT and p,p’-TDE residues on cigarettes are transferred intact to the mainstream smoke. In addition, p,p’-TDEE has been found at levels amounting to 13 to 46% of the identified chlorinated hydrocarbon residues in smoke condensate. From this study, as well as others, it may be assumed that 20% to 30% of the DDT-TDE residues present on the tobacco will be carried over to the mainstream smoke.”
We also know that inhaled DDT in cigarette smoke stays inside the body tissues and doesn’t get exhaled or excreted unless there is radical weight loss, because DDT is stored in fatty tissues around the body. (Why isn’t that a possible link to inflammatory obesity?)
Those same early studies looked at the amount of DDT exhaled and it turned out to be virtually none. The DDT stays with the smoker. 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.
So bottom line is that with each little cigar, another 300+ nanograms of DDT will enter the bloodstream of the girl or women smoker. If she’s pregnant, it will circulate in her blood and cross the placenta. If she isn’t pregnant yet, the DDT will bioaccumulate until, she is and then it will flow into the new baby and “spontaneously” abort it. As noted above, we know that for every 10 nanograms of DDT per gram of serum in her blood, her chances of a spontaneous abortion will rise by 17%, and it will keep rising indefinitely the longer she smokes.
We know that an average woman will have 300-400 grams of serum in her 5 liters or so of blood, and we know that DDT is bio-accumulative. A steady smoker will be increasing her total nanograms of DDT per gram of blood serum pretty quickly – with the excess steadily being stored in her fat. And if she doesn’t have enough fat her body will make more because the body is biologically compelled to store DDT in fat.
Because DDT crosses the placental barrier, if the smoker is pregnant her baby will unquestionably be exposed. Smoking several Swisher Sweets a day ( or really, smoking any non-organic tobacco or cannabis) puts the tiny baby at incrementally higher risk of spontaneous abortion long before the girl/woman may be aware she is pregnant. In other words, if the mother was smoking, but smoking only organic tobacco, or organic cannabis, then whatever damage her smoking was doing to her developing child, it would not be compounded exponentially with multiple pesticide exposure through her blood and across the placenta.
And by the way, no such study has ever been done so nobody knows what, if anything, smoking pesticide-free tobacco or cannabis does or does not do to pre-natal life, compared with what we know for sure continual multi-pesticide exposure does to early-stage developing human life. Spontaneous abortion may be the least bad of the potential outcomes of multi-pesticide exposure for a smoker’s baby.
DDT targets reproductive system tissues, and doesn’t discriminate between bugs and humans. It will abort babies regardless of species, and the more of it there is in human blood or tissues, the greater the likelihood of “spontaneous” abortion after any pregnancy begins. The world has been trying to remove DDT from contact with humans, and particularly developing human life, for generations. This Swisher Sweets company, part and parcel of the entire Tobacco Cartel, has such a gross disregard for human life that its actions are far more than negligent; they are criminal on the scale of crimes against humanity. There is knowledge and intent here, and conspiracy.
Thing is – this atrocity is totally preventable. Legislation can fix it virtually overnight. The free market can respond virtually overnight as well.
A good first step would be to require that the Tobacco Cartel’s products meet exactly the same pesticide residue limits that are currently imposed on Cannabis where it’s legal, or on any of the foods in the FDA’s Total Diet Studies. Every other consumer product in the world has pesticide residue limits and requirements and is at least marginally inspected to insure that those requirements are met for public health and safety reasons. It isn’t rocket science. Organic tobacco is safer to smoke than pesticide-contaminated tobacco. Duh.
People who choose to smoker, including pregnant women, can smoke without DDT and the other fungicides, insecticides, nerve poisons and hormone disruptors. Tobacco can be grown and tobacco products can be manufactured naturally, responsibly, and organically. American Spirit organic cigarettes prove this indisputably. The fact that there are nearly 200 commercial-scale organic tobacco farms in Virginia alone proves this indisputably. And in states where cannabis is legal there are hundreds or thousands of growers who are already growing organic medical cannabis without pesticides, demonstrating that there are some things that corporate cannabis can’t do as well as a small grower. A rational and informed market would reward these growers way above what it gives to corporate cannabis, and raising awareness of the consequences of inhaling pesticides on non-organic cannabis could help create that demand among people who enjoy cannabis flower.
To try to move the day a little closer when this slaughter will end and the perpetrators be held accountable, I have just submitted a “Citizen’s Petition” to FDA requesting that they conduct a Health Hazard Evaluation of all Swisher Sweets products for DDT contamination followed by the declaration of a Public Health Emergency if my initial findings are confirmed, My petition cites the specific clear and present dangers to thousands of unborn children of pregnant Swisher Sweets smokers, based on the clear science that I’ve outlined in this post. You can review this petition HERE. I hope that when the petition becomes available for public comment that you’ll add your support for this long-overdue move to protect the innocent unborn children of equally innocent smoking mothers, whatever you may think of their choice to smoke.
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