“In China and the Indian Archipelago, and wherever else opium is smoked, we ought to endeavour to supply it as pure and cheap as possible. It makes milder smoking than tobacco, and is evidently beneficial in many ways; and we may rest assured that mankind, where it has once taken to it, will never give up smoking either opium, tobacco, or some other such stuff, however silly it may look. It is not really sillier than eating and drinking, or any other natural action to look at, while it is undoubtedly one of the least alloyed of the pleasures of the senses, if, indeed, it may not be said to be almost a supersensuous pleasure; for it seems, in some way past searching out, to possess the true magic which spiritualises sense.”
32 million Americans are living with diagnosed type 2 diabetes, and 25% of these folks are smokers – about 7,000,000 people. Because they are diabetic, these smokers face aspecial set of severe hazardsfrom deliberately concealed highly bioactive insecticide and fungicide chemicals that every US Agency – FDA, EPA, USDA, CDC, the Surgeon General, FTC – all know are present and are being concealed but refuse to regulate or even inspect for in cigarettes. These are not those mysterious “additives”, or those infamous and ridiculous “7000 chemicals”, or any of the other nasty things we’ve all been told for years are dangers to smokers. These bioactive chemicals are a completely different level of hazard to human health, but you’ve never once heard about them in any anti-tobacco propaganda. They are potent, very dangerous and in some instances banned (but used on tobacco and inhaled with every puff) insecticides and fungicides that are proven Diabetes hazards (see also here and here) that have never once been mentioned in any government ‘smoking & health’ research or in any of the anti-tobacco programs and propaganda. They are doing irreparable harm to every smoker every day and are leading every smoker toward Diabetes, but for a smoker who already has Diabetes, inhaling this concealed witch’s brew with every puff is slowly and severely damaging their organs and nerves far beyond anything else in their life. And this is all completely and easily preventable.
“After reviewing 21 previous studies, researchers found exposure to any type of pesticide was associated with a 61 percent increased risk for any type of diabetes. The increased risk for type 2 diabetes — the most common type — was 64 percent, the investigators found.”
So it’s worth asking – how much of the daily and long-term damage Diabetic smokers are suffering from smoking contaminated tobacco cigarettes, meaning virtually every commercial brand, could be 100% prevented by switching to organic tobacco cigarettes? I wonder what would happen if a Diabetic smoker could eliminate just those pesticides without having to face the often futile struggle of “quitting”? For anyone who might think – “But that’s not a solution! That”s still smoking!” I’ll simply point to the impeccable logic behind needle exchange and condom distribution programs. You deal with the harm you can deal with.
My answer is that the damage from cigarette pesticides is actually 100% preventable and it doesn’t mean that Diabetic smokers have to go through the agonies of quitting tobacco or switch to lettuce cigarettes in order to stop harming themselves. All any Diabetic smoker has to do is switch to organic tobacco cigarettes for a week to begin feeling better than they’ve felt in a long time and see their numbers begin to improve. That’s correct. Once you know that these severely hazardous pesticide contaminants are in the cigarettes you’re smoking, and once you know what they are doing to your health, it’s just common sense to avoid them if you can, and if you do even for a little while you’ll see for yourself.
This is an incredibly easy fix to a horrible, widespread problem. It’s not a total solution, but it’s a good fix for those who need it. Diabetic smokers do not have to quit smoking tobacco to quit damaging themselves with inhaled neurotoxins, mutagens, teratogens, genotoxins, obesogens, and the other classes of highly bioactive insecticide/fungicide chemicals that are concealed as cigarette contaminants with full US government knowledge and complicity. I’ll show you the hard data below on the pesticides in just one common brand, smoked by over Two Million US Diabetics, with links to other equally compelling hard evidence.
Some kinds of change need a nationwide movement, but this revolution in Diabetic health can and should take place one smoker at a time as individual smokers realize that they can take control and help heal themselves without going through the agonies and depressing failures of trying to quit smoking. Equally important is that 20,000,000 pre-diabetic smokers in the US, and untold millions more worldwide, can each acting on their own, have a positive impact on their own health even if they don’t stop smoking. It’s what smokers are inhaling along with the tobacco in the tobacco product they”re smoking that creates this 100% preventable threat to their health, completely separately from the harm that the tobacco itself may or may not be doing. Please let me show you the evidence.
This post and related posts on this blog offer hard data to show that this severe hazard to health that exists far beneath everybody’s level of awareness can be 100% prevented by individual Diabetic smokers making a simple, easy choice that the US Government, the Tobacco Cartel, and the Anti-smoking/Anti-tobacco forces all want to keep them from making. That statement may be hard to believe, so let me offer you the hard evidence that this hazard is real and painfully obvious once it’s seen, and then let me offer the simple painless solution.
Let’s Look At Marlboros
Since Marlboro is most popular US cigarette brand, with a 40% share of all cigarette smokers, I’ll assume there are roughly 2.5 million Marlboro-smoking diabetics. Let’s see what’s happening to all those cowboys.
First, when it comes to Diabetes, let’s all notice that the CDC uses the words “causes Diabetes” in the statement below, which is about as certain as any science-based statement can be, but also notice that it is “smoking” that “causes” Diabetes, not “smoking tobacco” – which is what we are all supposed to assume is meant:
“We now know that smoking causes type 2 diabetes. In fact, smokers are 30–40% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than nonsmokers. And people with diabetes who smoke are more likely than nonsmokers to have trouble with insulin dosing and with controlling their disease.”
But what no government agency will ever tell these 2.5 million Diabetics who smoke Marlboros, or any other brand, is that they are being exposed with every puff to a ‘cocktail’ of unregulated insecticides and fungicides concealed in those cigarettes many of which on their own, when someone who is Diabetic is exposed, are known to severely complicate Type 2 Diabetes. And the fact also is that there has never once been a study on the health effects of smoking tobacco by itself – no contaminants, no additives, no reconstituted tobacco waste – just pure leaf. Never one research study. There are thousands of research studies of pesticides and human health, but zero on inhaling pesticides from cigarettes. None. There hasn’t even been a study on pesticide contaminants in cigarettes since around 1970 when the Tobacco Cartel realized they had a big problem and chose to conceal it.
You can browse a few examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research that virtually ended in the 1970shere and here and here and here and here. You will not find anything similar in the past 50 years. Neither the Cartel nor the US government want smokers to have a clue. Nothing to see here. Move along.
But before we get to that let’s fact-check that statement on the concealed pesticides in Marlboros and while we’re at it let’s check a few other brands too.
Here are hard data showing the fungicides and insecticides found in Marlboro cigarettes and other brands pulled off-the-shelf from area mini-marts by professional lab staff using randomized selection – I didn’t select the tobacco products to be tested – during 2018 lab tests of major US cigarette brands for my book “Smoke No Evil”. The lab I used is highly qualified to test for pesticide residues on commercial tobacco substrate due to its EU corporate parentage. The choice of USDA certified organic tobacco as the reference substrate was the lab’s decision, as was the inclusion of American Spirit Blues in the product selection. Here’s what the lab found – and here’s what any Federal regulatory agency could find anytime they looked.
It may be easy to just scan and dismiss that list, especially things labelled “trace”, but please slow down – each one of these pesticides has its own set of impacts on areas of special concern to Diabetics like glucose metabolism, inflammation, neuropathy, and other critical health issues for Diabetics. You can prove this for yourself.
Try this little exercise. Search the name of any of these pesticides plus any diabetic condition or complication together at random – “Azoxystrobin and neurotoxicity” for example, or “Bifenthrin and glucose”, or “Chlorantraniliprole and neurological”, or “ Penconazole and testicular”, or “ Fluopicolide and nephrotoxicity” or “Trifloxystrobin and neuropathy“.
Just poke around with whatever “Name of Marlboro pesticide/Diabetic symptom/condition” combinations interest you. By the way, those are random combinations above – try your own pesticide/condition combinations too, and please keep this research in mind while you browse:
“After reviewing 21 previous studies, researchers found exposure to any type of pesticide was associated with a 61 percent increased risk for any type of diabetes. The increased risk for type 2 diabetes — the most common type — was 64 percent, the investigators found.”
Just poke around in the science. No need to deep-dive at first – you’ll quickly get a sense of how broad this problem really is – and this is just set of pesticides from one brand. Other brands have very different pesticide profiles, and each insecticide and fungicide has very different impacts on Diabetes – much of it not yet studied. But with the search strategy above you can easily browse the already-known effects of exposure to the multiple highly bioactive pesticides that every Diabetic Marlboro smoker is inhaling +/-600 times a day – if they’re just a pack-a-day smoker.
Even more stunning when you think about it – not one doctor treating any Diabetic patient who smokes is aware that they are inhaling this incredible pesticide cocktail every day, because not one research study has ever been published on the subject, and there has never been a medical journal article raising even the possibility that this could be a problem for smokers. Research in this area has been completely absent from the world’s journals for over 50 years – although there is plenty of research on the consequences of exposure to pesticides – exposure to many of these pesticides alone, much less in combination, is known to lead to Type 2 and then if a Diabetic is exposed to make their Type 2 symptoms much worse. There’s plenty of research on that, but nothing on pesticides in cigarettes. Could this be a simple oversight? Oops – missed that one.
Not bloody likely – right? Here are examples of the kind of cigarette pesticide research that suddenly disappeared after the early 1970s, when the Tobacco Cartel realized what it all meant, you can browse a few examples of surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research here and here and here and here and here. All the Billions of dollars spent on “Smoking & Health” research and not one single study that simply compares smoking tobacco without pesticide contaminants with smoking contaminated tobacco products. Not even one study anywhere that said – “Hey, just for fun and because it’s dead simple to do, let’s just see what kinds of pesticide residues smokers are inhaling from these brands of cigarettes.” Not once.
This means of course that any complications of Diabetes symptoms due to this 100% preventable pesticide exposure are also 100% hidden from the Doctor’s view and can’t be detected much less diagnosed or appropriately treated. It also means the Diabetic smoker can’t make a fully informed decision about their own options. Very few smokers know there are organic tobacco product options, or why organic tobacco matters dramatically to their health and quality of life. With everything lumped together under “smoking” it’s impossible for a smoker or their doctor to be aware of the potentially hugely important differences between smoking tobacco with and without pesticide contamination – everything else kept the same.
So its also important to note that while we found ten Marlboro fungicides and pesticides above the level of detection, the fact is that in every cigarette brand there will always be dozens of other residues below those levels. (See the section at the end of this post for a long, long list of bioactive insecticidal and fungicidal chemicals known to be widely used on tobacco and known to leave residues.)
So if you’re wondering why its important that there are pesticide residues even below the levels of detection, let’s get a common mis-conception out of the way – that the size of the dose matters. That’s just in case anyone is tempted to say “Oh look here, that’s only a small amount of those pesticides, just a little trace, less than we can even detect. That little bit might kill tiny bugs, but how much damage could that infinitely small amount of pesticide do to a human?”
Please check this link: solid new neurotoxicology science tells us that a trace is all it takes for many new pesticides to perform exactly as designed. They don’t depend on dosage for firepower. They are 100% stealthy by design and even a few molecules on-target on-time will do the job on any endocrine system or any nervous system or any reproductive system of any living creature.Oh, and a blend of those designer supertoxins … what do you suppose they do to human beings when they’re all working together, like they’re supposed to?Nobody knows because nobody has ever imagined that anyone would be inhaling these insecticide/fungicide combinations, at any level.
Toxicology
“Toxic effects of pesticide mixtures at a molecular level: their relevance to human health”
The widely-held message in the toxicology science literature is that many if not most pesticides do their damage at molecular levels, far below the limits of detection, and science has demonstrated in the case of many of these pesticides that the classic dose-response model doesn’t apply, so dismissing pesticide contamination of tobacco products as a minor issue because of dosage is counter-factual.
This also ignores the fact that, for example, even the tiny concentrations of some of these pesticides on the tobacco in the brands we first tested in 2018 FAR EXCEEDED allowable limits on any other consumable food or food product. That Azoxystrobin in Marlboros is way over limits for food, but you don’t inhale broccoli or catfish, right? Besides, your gut can handle a lot more than your lungs, and your gut is set up to protect your body from neurotoxins but your lungs are a wide-open pathway to every vital organ – no barriers.
In fact, you don’t inhale pesticides into your lungs from any other consumer product; contaminated food and drink go through your digestive system and produce completely different outcomes from the same pesticide inhaled. For example, eating DDT isn’t an issue unless it is at very very high levels – almost by the spoonful. But even a trace of inhaled DDT goes straight into your bloodstream where it heads straight for your organs, glands, nervous system and DNA. (No, we didn’t find DDT in Marlboros, but we found enormous concentrations in Swisher Sweets.)
Bottom line – those fungicides and insecticides you see in the data above are severely damaging the health of the 2.5 million diabetics who are smoking Marlboros regardless of any damage the tobacco in those cigarettes may or may not be doing to them too.
Thing is – this damage from the insecticides and fungicides is 100% preventable, simply and easily.
So What Can A Diabetic Smoker Do Besides Quit?
Like almost all cigarette smokers most Diabetics want to quit, but like all smokers most of them who try simply can’t. They’ve tried, many times. It’s just too difficult. So like most non-Diabetic smokers they figure they just have to live with the damage their smoking does, although like all smokers they keep trying to quit or cut down or do something, anything. Nothing seems to work so they keep smoking cigarettes that keep exposing them to these hidden pesticides, that nobody knows are there, that are doing who knows how much of the harm, and causing who knows how much of the suffering, completely independent of any actual “tobacco” that may be in their Marlboro cigarette.
That’s pure tragedy. If they only knew that they don’t have to stop smoking to stop inhaling pesticides, which is even more important for Diabetics than for non-Diabetic smokers. A simple switch to organic tobacco cigarettes or RYO and they wouldn’t be inhaling pesticides when they fired up.
100% 0f the damage to their Diabetic state being caused by hidden, unregulated pesticides in their Marlboros is 100% preventable – they can easily and comfortably switch to organic tobacco cigarettes or organic tobacco RYO and completely eliminate that part of the damage from smoking.
Would that be enough to make a difference? Go back and Google some of those Marlboro pesticide/Diabetes outcome combinations. Check out some of the links. Decide for yourself.
Doctors do know that Diabetics who continue to smoke do worse, and Diabetics are even discovering that vaping pure nicotine instead of smoking seems improve their condition a bit. Both doctors and patients think that’s because the patients aren’t smoking tobacco anymore, confusing tobacco with cigarettes as we’ve all been trained to do, but IMO it’s quite likely because they aren’t inhaling pesticides anymore. But why debate this – why not just try eliminating pesticides in your cigarette smoke and see how you do, for starters.
So Why Not Just Quit Smoking And Start Vaping?
A major ‘real-world’ problem with diabetic smokers substituting vaping for smoking is that vaping a cloud of flavored nicotine just isn’t the same as smoking a cigarette for most smokers. Even those who hate cigarettes and want to quit still actually enjoy the act of smoking, which is one of the strongest reasons so many Diabetic smokers can’t or won’t quit. I have never yet seen a research study that begins with the assumption that people like smoking tobacco and that’s the reason they find it so hard to quit – because they really don’t want to at the same time they really do. So what is it that smokers actually want to quit?
I think many smokers want to quit feeling bad but would like to keep smoking tobacco if they could. I think smokers want a tobacco cigarette that is just tobacco, grown without pesticides and made with only natural flavorings and ingredients. And additives.
Natural additives? Yes of course flavor and aroma additives – just not industrial chemical additives. Natural herbs and fruits and roots and barks and berries – definitely yes. Tobacco has been flavored with those things for thousands of years. The whole FDA thing about “Additives” is a hoax, just like the whole thing about “Warnings” is a hoax. As long as everyone is distracted arguing about mint nobody is going to start asking questions about Azoxystrobin or Penconazole.
Anyone remember the “Tar & Nicotine” hoohah? Anybody ever ask what “Tar” is? The short answer is – no. Technically it’s the condensed smoke of a cigarette, so would that include pesticide residues? If that “Tar” came from Kentucky Reference cigarettes it did, but nobody looked and nobody found, so it remains just “Tar”. Could there be a reason why all that stuff is just lumped together and called “Tar”? Maybe we’re supposed to nod and pass on by and say “Oh yeah, tar.”
For those Marlboro smokers who don’t care to be manipulated a moment longer here’s a simple little experiment – starting tomorow, switch to pesticide-free organic tobacco cigarettes for one month and see how you feel and what your numbers look like. Don’t change anything else you’re doing – just change from whatever cigarette brand you’re smoking to an organic brand.
American Spirit Organic cigarettes are a convenient widely available choice — BUT none of their “natural tobacco” brands are organic tobacco and they are NOT free of insecticides and fungicides. If you decide to free yourself from what pesticides in cigarettes are doing to your health then choose only Americn Spirit organic cigarettes or, better yet, organic American Spirit Roll Your Own (RYO).
So far I have only been able to test one American Spirit brand and while it was less contaminated than several other brands I was able to test, only the American Spirit USDA certified organic tobacco brand is free of pesticides. Calling the other Americn Spirit brands ‘natural’ appears to be a statement of fact but its actually meaningless as far as eliminating your exposure to tobacco product pesticides. Only “USDA Organic” tobacco, no matter what the brand (and I hope there will soon be many choices) is free of those pesticide residues that Marlboro smokers are currently inhaling 600 times a day or more.
Smokers can also buy organic tobacco online and roll their own cigarettes, which is a great way to be able to combine organic tobacco with organic CBD or THC Cannabis, for example, but for a Diabetic smoker who simply wants to try the effects of eliminating inhaled pesticides from their life for a month, pre-rolled American Spirit Organic cigarettes are the obvious choice of convenience.
Turn your back on the propaganda, check out the science, think for yourself and try switching to organic tobacco, and see how you’re feeling in about a week. Then watch your numbers for a month. Then share what you’ve learned with others.
BONUS SECTION
If you really want to deep dive into the connection between Diabetes symptoms and conditions here’s a pretty confidential list (from a private lab) of most or all the pesticides that various US agencies say are OK to use on tobacco – and then never test for at all in any way in cigarettes. Not all of these are currently in use on US tobacco but worldwide there are all these and many more being used on tobacco that winds up in cigarettes. You’ll be hard-pressed to find this list in any US Government agency publication. This is not information that anyone, government or Tobacco Cartel, want you to have.
This table shows two Federal agencies approving of and regulating pesticides used on tobacco crops, but we know they never test tobacco products for those same pesticides to see what smokers are being exposed to. These pesticides are all approved by EPA, USDA and others for use on tobacco in the US, but not a single one was ever tested for its health effects when inhaled prior to or after its approval for use on tobacco crops. Every one of those pesticides you see in Marlboros was approved with ZERO testing of its health impact when inhaled – which is of course the ONLY way that tobacco is used. Oh, right – chewing tobacco. There’s plenty of science on what happens to mucosal tissue when its chronically exposed to pesticides, and of course the pesticides in that chewing tobacco are absorbed very efficiently. They are also absorbed 100% – none have been combusted by smoking, so all the pesticides in a wad of chew are available to enter blood and lymph. And neither smokers nor chewers, nor pipe nor cigar smokers, nor blunt rollers, are never told that they are in danger and have a choice – not a hint, never. The doctors don’t know either – everybody is dead certain, without the question ever being asked, that its smoking tobacco that’s sickening and killing people and they never go one step further.
There’s been a lot of money spent over the years to ensure that nobody ever thinks to take that line of reasoning another step. Of course its the tobacco. Everybody knows that.
Please keep in mind that many of these residues will never show up even if tobacco products are tested for them because they will be present below the limit of detection. However, as the science proves as you saw earlier, and is proving more every day, many of them are highly bioactive at even the molecular level. Still when you Google any of them in combination with any of the main Diabetic conditions I’m quite certain you may very well wonder why this information has never once been investigated in over 50 years of progress in Smoking & Health Research.
For example, check here’s one of the first links that come up when you search the first pesticide on the list “methamidophos” along with “diabetes”. You won’t hit every time – not every pesticide has been researched for its impact on Diabetes, and in the pesticide approval process nobody asks that question. Probably just an oversight, right? After all, how many people are going to be inhaling methamidophos along with dozens of others on this list? Where would anyone encounter methamidosphos in a normal everyday environment? Hmmm.
40 million or so American smokers and about a Billion people worldwide, that’s who. Oh, and their children if Mommy smokes, and 25% of women who smoke keep right on smoking through pregnancy. So that’s what – a couple of hundred million children born after being exposed to pesticides 24/7 throughout their development.
So now check out the pesticide cocktail ingredients a one-pack smoker is inhaling 600X a day.
Table I: Percent recoveries for pesticides included in the EPA approved list and USDA monitoring list for tobacco determined using QuEChERS extraction, dSPE cleanup, and GCxGC-TOFMS analysis.
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 are tobacco cigarettes. CDC, FDA, Truth Initiative, TobaccoFreeKids, all the players agree, with suitable reluctance for public consumption, that its 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 of course all those nasty additives. But now we know, because the government tells us so, that inhaling nicotine by itself is safer than smoking tobacco cigarettes. That’s because we all know, as the government tells us, that smoking tobacco is harmful, dangerous, and deadly – right? That’s what the government has been telling us since about 1965 – right? And that’s what all the research since the 1960s says, right?
Well actually no on the research and no on what the government is telling us
The truth is that we know zip 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 combusting tobacco and inhaling tobacco smoke. All the “Kentucky Reference” research cigarettes supplied to researchers worldwide since the 1970s BY THE TOBACCO CARTEL ITSELF have been contaminated with bioactive chemical contaminants, including globally banned fungicides and insecticides, concealed from the researchers and skewing the “tobacco smoke” and “cigarette smoke” data in unknown but undoubtedly significant ways. Concealed confounding variables.
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 smoking and health consequences of smoking tobacco. Every single scientist involved in smoking and health research worldwide has assumed that the ‘standardized’ cigarettes that the Tobacco Cartel supplied to them for their scientific studies were going to give them the results of smoking and being exposed to tobacco smoke – 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. These “Kentucky Reference Cigarettes” that have been used in every research study since the 1970s are and always have been contaminated with bioactive pesticide residues with known health consequences of exposure by any route, let alone by inhalation whole and dry distilled, but they have never once been mentioned or accounted for in any research findings.
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.
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”
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.
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.
Of course, the FDA has tried to head off any discussion of this by forcing the manufacturers of organic tobacco cigarettes to place an additional warning on the pack saying 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 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 well-paid with secure pensions and guaranteed consulting jobs after we retire as Federal regulators.”
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 “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”. Swisher Sweets are loaded with DDT and millions of young women smoke them.
But back to Marlboros for today. see that bifenthrin near the top of the list? That 0.870 mg/kg concentration translates to roughly 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, 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”
Guess what “commonly used insecticide” needs to be kept away from your prize bulls balls cowboy. Maybe yours too? 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.
But wait again! That research is only about little fish babies being affected by bifenthrin. So no worries for 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, and they’re talking toxicity.
Cytotoxicity and genotoxicity of methomyl, carbaryl, metalaxyl, and pendimethalin in human umbilical vein endothelial cells
“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 not one single study. Looks like some folks have some explaining to do one day, in the right court of law.
Meanwhile, if you or anyone you love is a smoker, here’s my thought of the day for you and for them: you can quit smoking tobacco products that everybody agrees are terrible for you, and they are terrible for you but not for the reasons you or anyone else thinks, but you can keep smoking tobacco like you enjoy doing, and you’ll actually enjoy it more, simply by switching to organic tobacco cigarettes or if you’re adventurous you can switch to making RYO organic tobacco cigarettes.
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.
As the legalization of Cannabis has gathered strength, research has finally begun to validate what many of us have known intuitively for years – that Cannabis may be the greatest medicinal and spiritual plant given to us on this planet.
One area of research where it’s becoming clear that Cannabis can offer natural, almost magical support and stimulation to life’s most basic processes is in the area of new stem cell research. It’s beginning to look like CBD can help stem cell “blood grafts” take more effectively, can help the brain repair itself after injury, and can help prevent and maybe reverse osteoporosis.
While every area of stem cell research is full of potential these days, let’s look more closely at the area of bone health, where research is showing that CBD may increase bone health by stimulating regenerative stem cell activity naturally and without toxicity. Considering that many of the “bone health” pharmaceuticals available today are industrial-strength poisons, this could be very big news for millions of people concerned about bone health now or later in life.
As the study cited above says:
“Collectively, this study demonstrates CBD to promote the migration of MSCs via activation of the CB₂ receptor and inhibition of GPR55 and to induce osteoblastic differentiation. CBD may therefore recruit MSCs to sites of calcifying tissue regeneration and subsequently support bone regeneration via an osteoanabolic action on MSCs.”
Roughly translated I think this means that CBD helps stem cells go where they are supposed to go and then to become new bone. As I understand the science of stem cells, which is technically way beyond me, stem cells are like seeds from which all human flesh and bone develops. Stem cells lie asleep in reservoirs throughout our body, waiting to become whatever kind of human tissue is needed. When the call comes, from wherever it comes and by whatever means, the stem cells are activated and then given a mission – go and become this kind of bone, this kind of organ, this kind of skin.
Stem cells seem to be the source of all original growth and all physical healing, which means that they are the natural means of both generation and regeneration of our physical selves. They are the seeds of our human being.
Since our bones are continually being renewed from within, throughout life wave after wave of stem cells are directed by these inner processes to wake up and go become bone. Guided by those same inner processes they head for just the right part of the skeleton and then find their way to the exact place, settle in just right, and then transform themselves into the right kind of bone. In a healthy body these processes occur naturally and continuously from conception to death.
What this bone health research seems to say is that CBD can increase the rate at which stem cells wake up, decide to become bone, head for the correct site on the skeleton, and make themselves into bone. This begs the question – could medical and supplemental CBD oils, extracts, edibles, and perhaps even CBD-rich Cannabis flowers, for all of the other reasons that are already known, just incidentally help keep your bones strong? While you might be taking CBD for gut or inflammation issues, or vaporizing CBD-rich flower for sleep, could you also be helping those little stem cells wake up and become healthy bone in your body? Could better bone health simply be a side-benefit of taking CBD as an overall anti-inflammatory life force supporting substance?
It would be fairly basic Group A and Group B science to check this out in the real world, wouldn’t it? I’ll bet that Big Pharma wouldn’t be happy with the results. Here’s why.
In addition to the stem cells becoming bone, there are other types of cells at work in building and maintaining our bones. Osteoblast cells carry calcium and other minerals from the blood and into the bones and lay down new bone structures, while osteoclast cells come in and remove old bone as it ages and dies to make way for new bone.
These two cells work together, one bringing in calcium for the stem cells that are waiting for the calcium in order to become bone, the other digging out old bone to be excreted.
In osteoporosis the cells bringing calcium for new bone slow down, but the cells taking out the old bone keep on mining. Also as you age your reservoir of stem cells begins to get depleted, and the remaining stem cells have less energy. They don’t wake up and become new bone cells as easily as they once did, so because of all these processes your bones gradually weaken. Fewer new bone cells are being made, but old bone cells keep being taken out and excreted.
So Big Pharma’s brilliant idea was to poison the osteoclasts to stop them removing old bone, then claim that their drug stops bone loss – which it does! The old, worn-out bone is no longer being removed. Doctors can proudly show patients that they’re no longer excreting calcium in their urine. Hallelujah! I’m healed!
Suddenly these drugs are being prescribed for tens of millions of people and Big Pharma is raking in the bucks.
The beautiful part of this, from the Nazi-inspired worldview of the world pharmaceutical industry, is that most of the victims are so old that the fact you’re actually poisoning them rather than “building bone” will never be an issue – their “Bone Density” numbers will look just fine all the way to the grave.
The Nazi conglomerate I.G. Farben whose pharma fortunes were based on experiments with concentration camp prisoners, would be proud of Fosamax. It’s manufactured by Merck, a close partner of Bayer, and therefore is an heir to all the blood-soaked data from Nazi experiments on humans.
Those experiments, conducted on “sub-human” test subjects, were intended to open the doors to new pharmaceutical discoveries that would support the Nazi plan to rule the world and rid it of “sub-humans”. They wanted to find out how to kill selectively in mass numbers. No expense, and no life was spared – it was a crash project. All this experimentation, involving the torture and killing of millions of “subjects”, has led to by a direct path to drugs with the worldview of Fosamax. That statement may need a bit of explanation.
That worldview says: “Give them a chemical that makes them believe they are being healed, and tell them they must take that chemical for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t matter if they are poisoned by the chemical as long as they pay us the maximum amount and believe that are being healed. The doctors will go along because we can convince them that this is the best they can do for their patients and besides, we will pay them well. They will cooperate – they always have.”
There should be no surprises here. After all, when it comes down to it, sick people are just another group of “sub-humans” to Big Pharma and Industrial Medicine. We know how the Nazis dealt with anyone who was sick and crippled arriving at the gates of their camps – they weren’t given a second thought. If you weren’t going to be useful in the experiments inside the camp you were simply disposed of in a trench next to the gate.
No wonder Big Pharma has been trying for over a century to prevent people from healing themselves with natural THC and CBD-rich Cannabis flowers that anyone can grow for themselves. It must drive the Pharma Nazis absolutely crazy that they have tried every dirty trick they could think of and nothing has worked. Now their nasty little “War On Drugs” conspiracies have been revealed and THC Cannabis has been shown to be a great natural medicine that just happens to make you want to sing and dance while it’s healing so much of what ails you – now along comes CBD-rich Cannabis Hemp, which those of who love natural medicines have always known was the true medicinal gem of the Cannabis plant.
So suddenly (in historical terms) elderly ladies in the Midwest are growing some fine THC Cannabis and CBD Cannabis/Hemp plants in their flower gardens like their grandmothers once grew Opium poppies for use in taking nice relaxing afternoon naps, so times are just naturally changing fast. My guess is that garden clubs are even considering Cannabis entries. What’s next – Coca plants? Even the best Pharma Nazi ideas like the “War On Drugs”, using winning strategies honed to perfection by these same companies during the Third Reich, have ultimately failed. Natural medicine that actually works to give respite and to heal will always be the people’s choice.
What a beautiful irony that stem cell therapy, one of the most advanced biological technologies, can be significantly improved with the power of a flower to the point where it might undercut and even destroy Pig Pharma’s markets for their Nazi bone poison and other evil brews simply by offering a better more natural choice. CBD and bone health may be another true application of flower power – the holy grail of many Cannabis-inspired seekers from the 1960s until now.
The Surgeon General’s Warnings are often cited as a barrier against holding the Tobacco Cartel accountable for the suffering and death their products are acknowledged to cause. This post offers evidence that these so-called “Warnings” are not warnings at all, and that they are factually flawed, deceptive, concealing and misleading, and that in reality they serve, by default or by design, the deep interests of the Tobacco Cartel.
If I may I’ll show you how these “Warnings” are the products of a decades-long record of legislative and policy actions that when seen in light of the hidden facts I’ll be showing you, amount to collusion to mislead and deceive science, medicine and the public by withholding deeply relevant material facts on the known contamination of tobacco products with neurotoxins, mutagens, obesogens and other biologically active chemicals many of which are classified as severe hazards at micro-levels of exposure. Whatever the tobacco in tobacco products may or may not be doing to smokers, the impact of these pesticide chemicals on smokers’ health has never been studied and has been either somehow totally overlooked, or deliberately concealed, but has not been mentioned other than the occasional carefully worded and deeply buried dismissal, in over 50 years of “smoking & health research”, legislation, policy, and court cases.
Here just a fraction of what FDA, the Surgeon General, EPA, CDC, and every other government agency that ‘regulates’ tobacco has been concealing since the 1970s. This is lab data from research I conducted in 2018 for my book “Smoke No Evil”.
And while you check out these data let’s keep in mind that FDA and a vigilante posse of clueless Attorneys General just spent tens of millions a few years ago to force the manufacturers of American Spirit to tell smokers on the package that organic tobacco isn’t safer for them to smoke. The FDA was and is in a total (fake) tizzy because some smokers have the nerve to continue to believe that organic tobacco is safer for them to smoke! Others are being deceived by the word “Natural” – but even FDA realizes that they can’t control the escape of that meaning from their word control game. And the BAT/RJ Reynolds/Cartel manufacturers who long ago bought and control American Spirit had to go along and comply – they couldn’t afford for smokers to see this kind of data regarding all their other non-organic and highly contaminated brands. They would like to kill organic tobacco. Besides exposing their crimes against humanity for anyone who knows what to look, American Spirit smokers are perfectly satisfied with an average of 10 a day while the average across all other brands is almost 16 a day, and up to 60 a day for seriously addicted smokers. Not addicted to Nicotine, by the way. AS organic has plenty of that highly desirable alkaloid. So why would the Tobacco Cartel be anything but horrified at the idea of smokers worldwide suddenly going to 10 cigarettes a day? The Cartel wants more, always more, and they have hundreds of millions of biochemically trained and conditioned smokers to give them just that. More and more until they die, to be replaced by another generation lured into accepting biochemical conditioning to always want more. That’s the game plan, and that’s the game plan that organic tobacco can totally disrupt.
They couldn’t defend organic tobacco as a safer smoke even in the face of blatant FDA and Attorneys General lies. What are they going to say – American Spirit organic tobacco is safer because all our other brands are loaded with lethal man-made poisons that are there so we can make more money and that we’ve been paying off government agencies and politicians to keep totally concealed since the 1970s?
But you do have to ask – what is the government’s game here? Why wouldn’t someone in the past 50 years have tested a cigarette or two? Didn’t heavily-funded agencies like FDA spend a lot of tax money on ‘research’ and ‘education’? Didn’t all those top-heavy non-profits like Tobacco Free Kids spend a fortune in other people’s donated money on ‘research’ and ‘education’ too? Couldn’t manage one study? There were tens of millions spent on ‘research’ leading to the ban on flavored cigarettes. Gotta ban those flavors, yessir. And now 2021 the FDA is closing in on menthol and mint – incredibly dangerous substances. So …
The collusion of power and wealth that has led to this bizarre rolling atrocity, which is fully on record and becomes clear once you factor in the hidden facts themselves, has involved the Tobacco Cartel and US government agencies including FDA, Surgeon General, EPA and USDA. These “Warnings” and all the law, policy and decision-making that have flowed from them are fatally flawed by a decades-long record of omission of what science clearly confirms are highly relevant facts that directly and severely impact the health of smokers.
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. This clear pattern of consistent omissions and failures to disclose or warn of these material relevant facts has held invariable for over 50 years of these “Warnings”, which is why they are suspect to say the very least.
Because of their direct, measurable severely harmful impact on people’s choices and behaviors these “Warnings” are in themselves hazardous and dangerous to smokers’ health because they deprive smokers of actionable factual knowledge that could if known and understood empower smokers to make their own decisions about their health, safety and lives. This broad, comprehensive failure to disclose or warn, which seems like it must be established policy rather than just a set of coincidences over all this time, comes while these same government agencies benefit financially from massive but ineffectual “anti-smoking” programs funded by the taxation of these same tobacco products.
One simple fact that supports the culpability of these government agencies along with the Tobacco Cartel is that the presence of extremely dangerous concentrations and mixtures of pesticide residues in tobacco products, including pesticides banned worldwide due to their severe hazard to human health, while known to all agencies concerned since at least the 1950s, has never once been cited in any US government action, policy, directive, regulation, research, educational initiative, or legislation intended to warn, educate or protect the public from the “dangers of smoking”. Never once.
Neither the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969, the Comprehensive Smoking Education Act of 1986, nor the GAO 2004 Report To Congress, nor the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 mention pesticides as tobacco product contaminants. The very few times they are mentioned it is peripherally and not directed at tobacco product contamination in any way.
The legislative history of these acts, even in summary, shows clearly the results of intensive lobbying to exempt tobacco and tobacco products from any regulation of hazardous substances – so of course there couldn’t be any mention of severely hazardous pesticides nor of the bodies of scientific and medical research that support a “severe hazard by inhalation’ status for these pesticides.
Perhaps even more difficult to comprehend is that from the 1970s through the 2000s companies of the Tobacco Cartel conducted extensive internal investigations on pesticides and tobacco products but incredibly focused ONLY on how pesticides affected the taste of the product. They are on detailed record as not caring about the toxicity of these pesticides – they even assured their employees who tested the contaminated cigarettes that the pesticides wouldn’t hurt them. Because these research projects were internal the companies were under no obligation to disclose them at any point in any official hearinga and, again oddly enough, not one single lawsuit against the industry appears to have picked up on the presence of these certified killer chemicals in the cigarettes that they have such difficulty in proving that they hurt their clients. So the knowledge of pesticide problems has been there since 1970 within the industry and within the regulatory community but those “problems” have only been whether the pesticides might make the ciggies taste bad. 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.
If it seems incredible that the Surgeon General would somehow manage to completely ignore the massive body of evidence that tobacco products are contaminated with pesticides beginning in the 1950s and continuing today, take a look for yourself.
Here is a link to the 2014 US Surgeon General’s report “The Health Consequences of Smoking: 50 Years of Progress”.
If you search for the word “Pesticide” you’ll get 4 hits – all irrelevant. Those “fifty years of progress” apparently don’t include any consideration of the role played by pesticides and fungicides in smoking disease and death but you can bet that there were and are those within the agency, and the FDA, EPA, CDC and others who know very well what’s going on and are being kept silent by what must be incredibly powerful forces.
Other searches in “50 Years of Progress”: “residue” = 3 hits; “organochlorine” = 1 hit (a cancer citation unrelated to residues on Tobacco); “agricultural” = 1 hit (duplicate of ‘residue’); “insecticide = 1 hit (unrelated citation); “fungicide” = 0; many names of specific pesticides – 0,0,0 etc. hits.
But the ‘official position’ could only be possible if tobacco is considered the substance to be exempt from regulation and, by extension tobacco products because tobacco products are just tobacco made into a product, right? Here’s a link to the legislative history of ‘tobacco’ regulation.
You’ll search in vain for any reference in any US agency documents since around 1970 to pesticide contamination of tobacco products – no reports, no studies, no labs, no inspections, no research – nothing.
The problem with that huge empty gap is that FDA, CPSC, EPA, USDA and other Federal agencies are in a position of long-standing institutional knowledge to be fully aware that they have never conducted a single study of the health effects of smoking tobacco that is uncontaminated with pesticides or adulterants, in other words USDA organic tobacco, and there has never been even one longitudinal study of smokers of uncontaminated, unadulterated cigarettes compared with smokers of pesticide contaminated adulterated cigarettes.
Then there’s the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which is intended to shield. and which almost everyone believes does shield the Tobacco Cartel from liability for manufacturing an unreasonably dangerous product. This Master Settlement, which recites all the transgressions of the Tobacco Cartel in the process of “settling” them, mentions pesticides and fungicides exactly zero times. Yet everyone involved in this Master Settlement either knew or because of institutional knowledge in their industry ought to have known about pesticide contamination of tobacco products, the exemption of tobacco products from regulation, and the potentially causal relationship between pesticide exposure and smoking-related disease and death. Besides, the MSA is only between “Settling States” and the Tobacco Cartel and does not exclude lawsuits by private citizens on their own behalf or that of a class of private citizens, so the Tobacco Cartel is still wide open to accountability.
None of the Surgeon General’s Warnings mention tobacco either – they all refer just to ‘smoking’ – and the wording of these Warnings and of the Master Settlement is not casual – and all those words, the ones selected and the ones omitted, the facts cited and the facts ignored, are the work product of hundreds of lawyers, bureaucrats, legislators, scientists, doctors, concerned citizens, insurance companies, oh, and Tobacco Cartel lobbyists. There is nothing accidental here. The omission of the word “tobacco’ from the warnings, and the omission of any mention of pesticide contamination in any related lawsuits or legislation or documentation or scientific research for that matter, of matters of scientific fact known by the government and the Cartel since the 1950s, cannot be an oversight or an accident.
Oddly enough, the Cartel kept very detailed internal review and research processes going throughout the 20th Century aimed at determining the impact of each of the pesticides they were using on how their cigarettes tasted to smokers. They were concerned that these deadly chemicals might make smokers think the cigarettes tasted funny, and they spent hundreds of millions on this research – in plain sight of government agencies. But because all of this research was “private”, and because they were able to totally suppress any publicly-funded research on pesticide residues in tobacco products, the subject of what these bioactive, xenobiotic chemicals were doing to smokers was totally concealed behind corporate walls. The record cited above, although severely limited in the scope of the pesticides sought in the records, shows that all this ‘research’ was conducted in plain sight of any regulatory agency that cared to notice. Any research shown in this record that these agencies did was strictly a matter of clearing pesticides for use on field tobacco – Federal agencies have all looked away from pesticide residues on the cigarettes millions of people were and are smoking. They are never mentioned.
There was and is, clearly and on the record, a conspiracy of silence in the Federal government that can only be due to impeccably concealed political and economic influence and the deepest possible corruption.
As an example of how deep-rooted this is, RJ Reynolds could easily have defended against the FDA assault on its single organic cigarette brand “American Spirit” by demonstrating that organic cigarettes actually ARE safer to smoke than other tobacco products just by testing a selection of those other products for pesticide contaminants and showing the findings in court, accompanied by some testimony from geneticists, endocrinologists, neonatologists and others who would have some enlightening things to say about pre-natal and lifetime exposure to these pesticides, based on the kind of hard scientific evidence the Court told RJR would be a solid defense. Look your honor – no DDT. Case closed. Safer.
Of course the problem with that strategy would be that those other contaminated and “more dangerous” brands would be all the other RJ Reynolds brands along with all the brands of all their friends in the Tobacco Cartel. Can’t have that – so “American Spirit” just sucked it up and agreed to say on their packs and displays that no, we’re sorry to have to tell you, but organic tobacco isn’t safer to smoke. The decision not to fight back with readily available and fully known (to them) science and fact cost the brand maybe $100 million – but what would disclosing “why” organic tobacco products are a safer smoke have cost the Cartel? Maybe an extinction event, and they know it. So that’s how it has gone for over 50 years – everyone on the Tobacco Cartel side of that American Spirit courtroom knew the real story and we just have to pray that the other side and the court didn’t have a clue and weren’t part of it when they offered that “scientific fact” escape clause, otherwise that would be some kind of conspiracy wouldn’t it?
But if this kind of widespread, ‘penetrates every corner’ omission is deliberate, in light of the well-established science on the risk levels of pesticide exposure on human health, then at a minimum neither the Surgeon General’s Warning nor anything like the “Master Settlement” can be used to shield the Tobacco Cartel that has used decades of political pressure and uncounted amounts of money to ensure that smokers, science, medicine, perhaps legislators, and most lawyers even the best, have all been kept not just ignorant but terminally misled and deceived about the true nature of the health consequences of what smokers are smoking and the genetic damage and disease that is being inflicted on their children and even grandchildren – all preventable. Even the most indirect suggestion of awareness of any of these topics is carefully avoided through extremely careful and deliberate use of language in the each of the Surgeon General’s warnings. They appear to be ‘plain English’ but they are fine-cut gems of deceit and obfuscation.
To understand the context of the creation of the original 1965 Surgeon General’s Warning, the US Surgeon General had extensive factual evidence even in 1965 that since the early 1950s there had been growing industry and scientific research on pesticide residue contamination of the US tobacco and tobacco product supply. In 1962 Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring”, generating an awareness of the potential environmental and human health dangers of DDT, one of the pesticides known to be contaminating the US tobacco product supply. By 1965 scientific and medical concern over DDT, and increasingly over the lesser-known organochlorines, was widespread and growing. There was no way that the SG, during the government-wide research into smoking and health that preceded the Warning, could have missed the massive amount of research on pesticides residues in tobacco products, nor could the SG have been unaware of the developing science on pesticide exposure and the human health consequences.
Here is a summary of DDT regulatory history prepared for Congress by the EPA in 1975 – notice that it goes into what the Surgeon General and Congress knew at every stage of creating the “Warning”.
A reading of this tells us what the Surgeon General ought to have known about the health consequences of exposure to DDT and the organochlorines in 1965 and 1969, as well as the new pesticide class of organophosphates. Although this was early in the science, plenty of scientists and doctors understood what was coming.
There is also a large body of published agricultural science research from the 1955-1970 timeframe in the area of pesticides and tobacco, and there are many studies showing the entire class or organochlorines being used extensively on tobacco. There are even a few studies on some of these OCPs in cigarettes, but those studies tend to focus on DDT, DDE, TDE, and other derivatives. But it is extremely important not to lose focus on the OCPs like Endrin, Aldrin, Dieldren, Toxaphene, Heptachlor and many others that were being inhaled by smokers of the time. Many of these smokers who were young then are suffering in 2021 from the consequences of that early and continuing chronic pesticide exposure and neither they nor their doctors have a clue. The docs and the smokers just attribute what they see and experience to smoking and look no further. If there is any kind of therapy available now or in the future for any of the kinds of damage that lifelong pesticide exposure might do, smokers will never see it unless doctors understand what they have actually been inhaling all those years. And for those who cannot quit, their docs will never see the merit in their switching to organic tobacco. That’s a lot of suffering and dying caused by universal ignorance arising from deliberately crafted deceit.
DDT is the specific focus on who knew what and when they knew it because its dangers were already widely recognized in 1965 and it was being heavily studied by tobacco scientists of the time. However when the final accounting is done on the toll taken by the tobacco cartel’s reckless, negligent, knowing and intensive use of organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides, and what was already known or suspected about their health impact, while acting to prevent knowledge and oversight of their use, thereby preventing any mitigation efforts that might have been made to preserve the lives of millions of innocent smokers who, later on, while they were dying, would be told “Well, you were warned, and besides we were sued and settled forever. We’re bulletproof.”
Maybe not so fast. There’s the little matter of the record. For example, by 1965 the public was seriously up in arms over the dangers of DDT. The USDA has been researching DDT and tobacco for nearly 20 years by then, and many land grant universities were studying the use of pesticides on tobacco. Tobacco was the most valuable crop per acre in the US, and multiple state and federal were all over it with funding for pesticide research. So the use of pesticides on tobacco crops was and is well-known. And yet – the Surgeon General’s 1965 warning didn’t mention DDT or pesticides contaminating tobacco products then and never has since. If you search the long history of dozens of Surgeon General’s “Reports” on smoking and health (links are at the end of this post) you will not find one reference to pesticide residues contaminating tobacco products.
And yet, the every US Surgeon General since 1965 either knew, or by virtue of their authority, command position, and oversight of science and medicine policy and research, ought to have known of the presence of pesticides in tobacco products. High-ranking staff either knew there had to be pesticide contaminants in tobacco products or deliberately looked the other way because material facts and knowledge was all over the government. Despite growing scientific and medical evidence of the harm that done by low dose, chronic and even single-exposures, even at nano-levels, and despite numerous updates of the Warning since 1965, the imminent harm and danger represented by pesticides in tobacco products has never once been addressed or even mentioned. Not even mentioned – in any US Surgeon General’s document or in any other US government publication, policy or regulation.
I believe that this historical and long-maintained and without-exception omission invalidates the Surgeon General’s warning and everything that flows from it in law as a shield for the Tobacco Cartel because it can be documented that these complex interlocking legislative firewalls against discovery of the simple fact of contamination could not exist without an organized conspiracy to conceal and actively suppress this information thus preventing smokers from being able to make ‘quit smoking’ decisions in full light of information on the preventable dangers posed by pesticides and the availability of a safer smoking alternative – tobacco products manufactured from organic tobacco without pesticides – that the defective “Warning” conceals from them.
However, rather than disclosing the factual information that the SG had at hand in 1965 regarding just the tobacco product DDT contamination problem that would, if known even in 1965, have given many smokers and their families a potentially powerful additional reason to quit smoking – this readily available and extremely meaningful knowledge was concealed. We know that it would have been meaningful even in 1965 when the first SG warning was drafted simply by looking at the scientific, medical and public outcry over DDT in the environment.
The USSG and other US government agencies were spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year by the 1960s to get the public to “quit smoking”. The biggest problem with this is that even though there was plenty of evidence in 1965 that DDT exposure was dangerous, in the 50 years since and with the development of literally hundreds of new fungicides and insecticides for tobacco, not a single one has ever been tested for their impact when inhaled as part of a cigarette smoke stream. Not one, not ever.
So how does the US Surgeon General’s “Warning” immunize the tobacco cartel from responsibility when it can be shown with solid documentation that unknown persona or organizations have manipulated that warning so that the dangers of pesticide contamination would never be revealed? The fact that there has not been a single study of pesticides residues contaminating tobacco products since the early 1970s is, in my opinion, irrefutable evidence that organized worldwide repression of research has been occurring.
For over 50 the USSG years been issuing disingenuous, misleadingly worded warnings about smoking while conflating the words tobacco and smoking to create the impression that science has established that smoking tobacco causes disease, suffering and death while being institutionally aware that there are hidden confounding variables in all the science that, if known, could invalidate the conclusions of almost all or all of the smoking and health research over the past decades. In other words, if anyone had ever taken the pesticides into account, and had tested the health consequences of smoking tobacco with and without pesticides, then the SG warning might have some real-world validity.
I believe that the SG Warning is tainted by complicity with the Tobacco Cartel’s decades-long effort to prevent regulatory focus on industry-wide dangerous levels of unregulated and concealed pesticide contamination of the Cartel’s products.
There have been decades of research on the public health implications of any kind of chronic exposure to pesticides known to cause human neurological damage, cancer, obesity, birth defects and more, and this body of research must have been systematically ignored the US Surgeon General, the CDC, the FDA, the EPA, the CPSC, the USDA, and by every other US agency charged either with regulating tobacco products or with protecting the public from dangerous, life-threatening chemical exposures. I say “must have been systematically ignored’ because each of these agencies has specifically and in most cases repeatedly exempted tobacco products from any regulation of their known pesticide contaminants.
This contamination represents a novel route of pesticide exposure by inhalation, conceded by science to often be the most toxic route of exposure. Through repeated inhalation of a complex of neurotoxic, carcinogenic, obesogenic and mutagenic chemicals that over the period of successive legislation aimed at ‘regulating’ the Tobacco Cartel have been widely shown to act on the human body at nano-levels well below the limits of detection.
Regulatory agencies and non-profits are all on board
“Because use of Tobacco products, with or without pesticide residues, is so hazardous to health, all of the Oregon Health Authority’s efforts around Tobacco are aimed at discouraging use of Tobacco products and encouraging cessation of Tobacco use in people already using it.”
Oregon Health Authority 2018
“EPA does not assess intermediate or long-term risks of pesticide residues to smokers because of the severity of health effects linked to use of Tobacco products themselves.”
EPA 2018
“Organic,” “natural” or “additive-free” product labels may imply a healthier or safer choice, but that couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to Tobacco products. A cigarette with organic Tobacco or Tobacco with no additives does not make it healthier or safer than any other cigarettes.”
Truth Initiative 2018
No Federal or State agency has ever initiated any such studies with an RFP, and to the best of my knowledge no such research has ever been submitted for funding. I have done a complete Federal Register search, but please feel free. Certainly no such study has ever been published. Yet every single agency, public and private, that is engaged in public health regulation and education, spends enormous resources on what they say is a comprehensive search for answers to why cigarettes sicken and kill so many people and why smokers find it almost impossible to quit. They all believe, or seem to believe, that they have the answer.
It’s the tobacco and the nicotine – we just can’t seem to figure out exactly why. But clearly there’s no need to question our basic assumption – it’s the tobacco and nicotine. Period.
During the Tobacco Cartel’s worldwide mobilization against the new wave of concern over smoking and health and the new regulatory environment during the period in the mid-late 1960s when the SG Warnings were first being crafted, high-level strategy sessions (conspiracies) took place in which managing public and legislative perceptions were seen as critical.
“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” R. J. Reynolds/ B&W executive, 1969 (in: Scientific American, June 15, 2005)
It has worked so beautifully that 300,000,000 people have died of “smoking” since 1970 and there has not been one study of pesticide contamination of tobacco products in 50+ years of intensive focus on smoking and health. Not one of the hundreds of billions of dollars spread around for ‘research’ that the Cartel knew was invisibly being skewed in the direction that they wanted – a set of powerful hidden variables confounding the results of every single study of smoking and health. Those unaccounted-for pesticides distort and invalidate every research study on smoking and health that uses the Cartel’s “Kentucky Reference Cigarette” program that supplies “standardized research cigarettes’ to every research project in the world. To the best of my knowledge there has never been a study on smoking and health that did NOT use Kentucky Reference cigarettes or extracts from them. The results of using these standardized ‘tobacco’ cigarettes, contaminated with invisible, unaccounted-for insecticides and fungicides, is to show that – “yep, by golly, that tobacco sure is dangerous stuff. Look what smoking it did to all those little mice.” Once everybody accepts that it is that tobacco doing the damage then the manufacturers can skate free by saying “Sorry but you were warned. Oh, not about the DDT and Carbendazim and all the rest but hey – you already knew because we totally warned you that the tobacco was dangerous and terrible and would make you sick and maybe kill you and you smoked it anyway so tough luck sucker. Next!”
But … but … the Surgeon Generals warning said smoking and cigarettes and didn’t mention tobacco. That’s right dear reader – the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarette packs never mentions tobacco, only smoking. So who actually says tobacco is dangerous, and proves it with research? (More on this later) Where is the warning that smoking tobacco is dangerous? Nowhere to be seen, but that doesn’t stop the anti-smoking forces embedded in every government agency. That’s clear evidence of a massive, expensive, corrupt word game that is being played today the same way it was played in the beginning. And the suckers are still falling for it.
Very early on the Cartel succeeded in their main goal – implanting the idea that “it’s the tobacco”, because if everybody automatically equates the word tobacco with words like hazardous, dangerous, cancer and death, then it becomes the plant’s fault and we can’t help it if they want to take a little risk – besides, they’ve been warned. Just like the manufacturers of alcohol products – drinkers know the risks. But … what if you were a wine drinker and found that there was a cocktail of neurotoxic pesticides in every glass of your wine, and that they were having a cumulative effect on you, and that the manufacturer knew those neurotoxins were there because they had used them to control pests and increase their grape harvest and the government didn’t make them disclose it so they didn’t. Well maybe OK so far. But how about if we know they had conducted internal tests to ensure that the pesticides didn’t affect the taste of the wine, and since their trade association has issued guidance on the effects of these neurochemicals and how they should spray responsibly, they are clearly aware of their presence. Is there at a minimum a duty to warn?
However, the Tobacco Cartel knew it had a problem on its hands. In a 1968 report to CORESTA, the newly-formed Tobacco Cartel ‘Scientific Organization’, NCSU researcher Dr. Frank Guthrie, a widely published authority on pesticide residues on field tobacco and in tobacco products, sounded the alarm in front of the entire tobacco industry’s executive & management hierarchy- very specifically referring to the health issues presented by the known fact of DDT storage in human fat cells
.
Notice the concentration of DDT that was considered ‘no problem’ in food back in 1968 – FDA said ingesting 0.04 mg/kg was OK while WHO said ingesting 0.01 was the limit?
Now check the concentration of DDT shown below on just one of today’s tobacco products. This data is from tests I commissioned for my own research – the first tests of pesticides in cigarettes run since 1970. I’ll save you the math – that 0.816 mg/kg in today’s Swisher Sweets is half the 1968 amount of 0.03 mg/pack. If a smoker in 1959 was exposed to 0.03 mg of DDT per pack of cigarettes, and each cigarette weighs 1 gram, that’s 20 grams of tobacco per pack. So in 1000 grams (kg) of tobacco that same 0.03 mg/pack concentration of DDT measured in mg/kg would be 1.160 mg/kg. Since 1959, when DDT was actively sprayed to tobacco crops to 2018 when DDT had been banned for 50 years, the amount contaminating tobacco products was only reduced by half – not near-zero where it should be if DDT weren’t still being used on tobacco. Wonder what’s going on here? We all should.
But it’s not just the concentration in the tobacco, it’s what is inhaled and deposited in the smoker’s blood and tissues. So using calculations based on 1960s research on DDT absorption & retention from cigarettes, I calculate that 168 nanograms of inhaled, not ingested DDT wind up in the blood of a Swisher Sweets smoker with every one they smoke. 10 a day? 20? But the Surgeon General has the nerve – is that the word? – to issue a report entitled “The Health Consequences Of Smoking: 50 Years Of Progress”.
On parallel but separate tracks research had begun on the environmental and health impact of DDT and the organochlorine family of insecticides began in the early 1950s. By the end of the 50s there was widespread recognition of the damage done to wildlife exposed to these insecticides.
By the time the first Surgeon General’s warning was crafted, intense (but controversial) research on the human health consequences of exposure to DDT and the organochlorines had already established that they were carcinogenic.
Because other departments of the US government had been conducting extensive trials and publishing a lot of data on the use of pesticides on tobacco since the late 1940s, and since there were multiple detailed studies throughout the 1950s-60s of the pesticide contaminants in cigarettes, with a lot of attention to DDT and the organochlorines, the US Surgeon General and the US Congress either knew or by virtue of their regulatory and command authority ought to have known in 1965 that pesticides were contaminants in every cigarette being smoked in America.
Now Let’s Focus On FDA
The FDA is in a position of institutional knowledge to know that inhaled pesticides from whatever source represent a clear and present danger to an individual’s health, and that mass contamination of any product that results in the exposure of millions of people to multiple pesticides known to cause multiple neurological, hormonal and genetic diseases is a significant public health threat. With 500,000 ‘smoking-related’ deaths a year in the US and 7 million worldwide, smoking is way ahead of COVID.
So I have to ask why the FDA is making the only manufacturer of organic cigarettes in the US deceive its customers by telling them that they cannot shield themselves from the harm being done by pesticides in all the other brands being offered to them, and that smoking tobacco without pesticides “USDA organic tobacco” is just as dangerous as smoking pesticide contaminated tobacco – every other Tobacco Cartel brand in America.
In designing and forcing this compliance, it can be demonstrated conclusively that FDA has in-depth institutional knowledge that smokers are price-sensitive in their smoking decisions and choices, and they know this because raising the price of cigarettes is the #1government strategy used by FDA and other government agencies in the “anti-smoking” business to force people to cut down or quit. Make cigarettes unaffordable, the mantra goes, and they will quit.
Of course, government-funded research has also shown conclusively, many times, that raising the price does not drive smokers to quit; it drives smokers to cheaper smokes. And of course no matter how cheap a tobacco product the government still takes the same cut – or actually increases it, claiming it’s to get the damned stubborn smokers to quit.
But what this policy also does is this:
Let’s say I’m a smoker who wants to quit, but not really (like most smokers) but let’s say that I am getting more aware of my health and think maybe smoking organic tobacco would be less harmful. I’ve heard all the stories about additives and cancer and ‘7000 chemicals’ in cigarettes and I know that organic means healthier so organic cigarettes might seem like a good idea.
But – the moment I pick up a pack of American Spirit organic cigarettes I see two things – they are telling me right up front that it isn’t any safer, and the price is a couple of bucks higher.
Well no thank you. I’ll just take some vitamins and keep smoking my Marlboros, or Camels, or Swisher Sweets.
So here’s a summary of what I see going on – take a look yourself and tell me I’m wrong.
1. FDA knows that smokers, especially low-income smokers, are price sensitive
2. FDA knows organic tobacco products must be priced higher than non-organic tobacco products simply because it is more expensive to produce organic agricultural products in any category
3. In 2015 FDA forced the manufacturer of American Spirit organic cigarettes to place a warning on the pack telling customers that ‘natural’ tobacco without ‘additives or chemicals’ is not safer than what they’re already smoking.
4. FDA couldn’t attack American Spirit “organic tobacco” in that 2015 action because that “organic” certification is part of USDA’s lucrative franchise and the two agencies work closely together to ensure that their client, the Tobacco Cartel, is protected.
5. So in 2017 the California Attorney General, at the instigation of and in ‘coordination’ with FDA, took legal action and ‘forced’ RJ Reynolds/American Spirit to say on the package that “organic tobacco does not mean safer tobacco”.
6. FDA knows that in addition to a higher price such warnings will this will keep at least some smokers from choosing organic cigarettes, which FDA/USDA knows are not contaminated with pesticide residues, in preference to all other non-organic brands, which FDA has institutional knowledge are contaminated with multiple pesticides including DDT in some brands popular in communities of color.
*For the remainder of this summary we’ll focus just on DDT, one of dozens of pesticides known to contaminate US cigarette brands
7. FDA knows the broad range of health impacts of DDT exposure including endocrine disorders, neurological disease, genetic damage, birth defects, cancer and much more
8. FDA knows that DDT is banned for all agricultural uses worldwide
9. FDA knows that specific tobacco product brands are contaminated with DDT
10. FDA knows that all cigarette brands except a single organic brand, American Spirit organic, are contaminated with dangerous pesticides and FDA knows the health impact of exposure to these pesticides
11. FDA knows that none of the pesticides that contaminate tobacco products have been tested for the health effects of exposure through inhalation by smoking because FDA knows that no such research has ever been funded
12. Since 2015 FDA has been forcing price-sensitive smokers to avoid the only alternative that will not expose them and their children to pesticides known to be health & life-threatening at exposure levels the FDA knows they will be exposed to when inhaling non-organic pesticide-contaminated tobacco products.
13. Since 2015 approximately 3 million American smokers have died from “smoking-related” disease. Approximately the same number of spontaneous abortions are reliably estimated by CDC to have occurred among smokers. Approximately 7 million of 32 million diabetics smoke, and exposure to DDT and other organochlorines has severe health consequences for diabetics. Approximately 12-14 million Americans smoke Swisher Sweets, a tobacco product proven to be contaminated with heavy concentrations of DDT. There is no data by which to directly estimate the impact of the FDA pro-active affirmative decision to expose these 12-14 million mostly Black and Brown smokers to DDT from this single tobacco product.
14. FDA is pursuing a strategic policy that FDA’s own research shows is impacting poor and marginalized smokers disproportionately. This is because brands that are most highly contaminated with the most dangerous chemicals are also the lowest-priced brands made with the cheapest imported tobacco. FDA has full institutional knowledge, through its research relationships with USDA, EPA and CDC among others, that imported tobacco is highly contaminated with pesticides and FDA knows that includes at least one banned pesticide – DDT – that is then used to manufacture tobacco products, which FDA pro-actively rejects as needing regulation or inspection of any kind.
15. The entire FDA/USDA strategy actually suits the Tobacco Cartel 100%, because now they believe it’s far less likely that anyone is going to ask why smoking organic cigarettes might be safer than smoking all the others.
FDA is directly complicit, along with co-conspirator ‘anti-smoking’ agencies and ‘anti-tobacco’ non-profits who collaborated on the design and implementation of this policy, and the Tobacco Cartel itself who is the behind-the-scenes director and prime beneficiary – always – in 100% of whatever the scale of disease and death is being caused by smokers being misled, lied to, and otherwise discouraged from choosing an organic tobacco product and who because of this widespread conspiracy are continuing their exposure to DDT and other life-threatening pesticides in non-organic tobacco products every day of their lives since the FDA’s implementation of this strategy in 2015.
This FDA strategy combined with the history of the US Surgeon General’s ‘warnings” are evidence of the widespread web of concealment and deceit created by the Cartel to shield themselves from – what? If they were not terrified of the disclosure of pesticide contamination of their products why would they have worked so tirelessly and at such great expense to create this complex network of checks and balances in their favor? And now of course the Cartel is trying to move people away from any relationship with anything called ‘tobacco’ and into straight nicotine hits. What isn’t understood is that this is a plan to move away from the exposure to massive liability that will happen when and if awareness begins to dawn of just what has been perpetrated through this trans-generational conspiracy and crime against humanity by private wealth, not a genocidal dictator or police state.
Yet every official statement including the Surgeon Generals warnings, seamlessly conflates smoking-related disease and smoking cigarettes with tobacco while they have institutional knowledge that the message is misleading and deceptive and may in fact be obscuring a major preventable contributing cause of smoking-related disease and death.
I believe that a conspiracy to conceal the threat created by pesticides in tobacco products exists and has existed for decades because the factual evidence is and has been in plain sight. However, it is as much about what is not there as what is there to be seen. What is not there is any published study of any possible pesticide residues in tobacco products since the early 1970s. For the past 50 years evidence of the multiple causal relationships between pesticide exposure at the molecular level – below the limits of detection – and human genetic and physical damage have been solidly established. There is no argument that pesticide exposure causes injury and death – there are literally thousands of studies of that. The only arguments among pesticides exposure & health researchers center around how much exposure to which substance or combination of substances causes what outcomes.
However, exposure by inhalation hundreds of times a day over years of smoking have never been studied – not once. Why would they, since it is only happening with tobacco products and that knowledge is sealed away from view.
Nevertheless everyone involved on the government side has or ought to have deep institutional factual knowledge that there are pesticide residues in tobacco products. Everyone involved also has or ought to have deep institutional factual knowledge that chronic exposure to many of these same pesticides, some at nano-levels, has been strongly associated or causally related to multiple diseases and conditions. These include breast cancer, obesity, neurological diseases, birth defects, degenerative diseases, cancer, and autism – by no means an exhaustive list, but how long does such a list have to be?
From the 1950s until present (2021) there has been institutional knowledge in multiple Federal agencies that field tobacco grown in the US is contaminated with residues. In fact there is rather detailed regulation of what pesticides can be sprayed on US tobacco. But that’s where it ends. No inspection of tobacco products, and no inspection of tobacco from Brazil or India – which is where the DDT contamination comes from, by the way. Beginning in the 1980s the US tobacco product ecosystem was increasingly populated with brands manufactured from tobacco grown in world jurisdictions without regulation of pesticides use on tobacco crops. For those countries, tobacco exports are a top revenue-generator, and millions of their farmers are dependent on tobacco for survival. There is no regulation, and US agencies acknowledge this fact. However, they do not inspect tobacco that is imported for manufacturing tobacco products for the residues of pesticides, and they only require that the importers certify that the shipment is not contaminated with any pesticides registered for use on tobacco in the US in excess of the US regulatory limits on field tobacco. There is no requirement that the importer disclose any pesticide residues of pesticides not registered in the US, nor that their shipment is not contaminated with the residues of any banned pesticides like the DDT and Carbendazim that our tests found on one brand of little cigars.
My argument here is that in 1965-69, when the health warnings on cigarette packs were being written by Congress and the US Surgeon General, through intense negotiation with the Tobacco Cartel and their Congressional representatives, the SG already had access to 15 years of environmental and health research not just on DDT but on an array of other organochlorines and then organophosphates. There was intense scientific and medical attention being paid to the environmental and health consequences of exposure. The USDA, the US Surgeon General, and the Congress knew that Tobacco and Cotton were the heaviest users of these chemicals. All this heavily-funded research was directed at the health consequences of exposure through commercial, agricultural and government spraying, industrial use, household bug sprays, and every other conceivable way that people could be exposed.
But never on exposure by smoking contaminated cigarettes. Federal research money was never then or since directed toward any such investigation – it never happened, in spite of the intense concern over the causes of smoking-related disease, and in spite of the massive body of research on pesticide exposure – although never on humans and never on exposure by smoking/inhalation.
The Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969
Required a health warning on cigarette packages
Banned cigarette advertising in the broadcasting media
Called for an annual report on the health consequences of smoking
Historian Samuel Hays summarizes the evolution of concern over DDT:
“Whereas proceedings against DDT in the late 1960s had centered on adverse ecological consequences, similar proceedings in the 1970s focused primarily on human health.”
This paper has been focused on one insecticide, DDT, that has been shown to contaminate a single sample of one tobacco product. In the same set of lab tests, five samples of five brands were tested. All showed contamination with insecticides and fungicides that are known to have human health consequences. Exposure to some of the chemicals detected are known to have human health consequences at the molecular level – below the limits of detection. So if they are detectable, their concentration must be more than sufficient to cause the damage attributed to them at molecular levels.
Here are links to every one of the Surgeon General’s publications, including every one on tobacco and smoking. There are only a few minor and insignificant references to pesticides (>10) and there are no references to their presence as residues in tobacco products or to their potential impact on smokers’ health. There are no research references to pesticide studies – even any unrelated to smoking and just about the dangers of exposure. Nobody reading any of these reports would have even a hint that it was anything but tobacco and nicotine killing smokers and destroying the lives of their children.
BTW – when you have any of these reports open you can search the entire document instantly by using Control+F (PC) or Command+F (Mac), then enter the term you’re looking for like ‘pesticide’ in the search box that pops up, and it will find every instance of that term in the document. Handy when searching crap like this.
Find anything in any of these documents, produced with great effort at great expense over the course of generations? Pretty strange oversight, wouldn’t you say?
To wrap up this post, here is a table showing the incredible number of pesticides that are actually permitted on US-grown tobacco. The table isn’t from any official US source – you’ll never find that info. This is from a website of a lab testing company that apparently does trials to find out what levels of these pesticides can be detected on tobacco grown here in the US. But don’t worry – most US tobacco is considered so clean by countries that do have pesticide residue standards, like the EU, that most of the US tobacco with these pesticides will wind up overseas. US smokers get the really gnarlylike stull DDT and Carbendazin from places like India and Brazil. That’s a whole ‘nuther story – and much worse than what you see here. Which is bad enough – right?
Table I: Percent recoveries for pesticides included in the EPA approved list and USDA monitoring list for tobacco determined using QuEChERS extraction, dSPE cleanup, and GCxGC-TOFMS analysis.
Yes they are, in more than one way. Here’s the story.
A sample of Swisher Sweets little cigars we pulled at random from a local mini-mart and tested in a registered pesticide testing lab turned out to be heavily contaminated with DDT, one of the most dangerous substances on earth, and totally illegal at any level in any product – except tobacco products, which are exempt from all the rules on pesticides like DDT that otherwise protect public health.
The presence of DDT is especially serious wakeup call for millions of mostly young, mostly Black and Latino males who are Swisher Sweets smokers. For those Swisher smokers it will be very bad news for their testicles and sperm, and their eventual children if they don’t somehow get the word. It’s important to say we could only afford to test Swisher Sweets- as soon as we can test more brands I’m confident we’ll find widespread DDT contamination in many other Cartel products including quite likely every little cigar brand.)
The health consequences of exposure to even vanishingly tiny amounts of DDT have now been extensively studied by generations of scientists, but never when that exposure takes place by smoking and inhaling contaminated tobacco products, and now that the impact of DDT at nano-levels is becoming clear, the scope of the damage that smoking DDT has been causing for those 5-7 generations can be seen – if we care to look.
The damage looks especially widespread when you take into account that smokers have been inhaling unseen and unaccounted-for DDT since the 1950s. We know that DDT exposure is a cause of obesity. DDT exposure at nano-levels, well below the limits of detection on a tobacco leaf or in a Swisher Sweet, has been shown to create high risk of obesity and diabetes in an exposed person’s lifetime and we also know that such DDT damage is genetic – it crosses generations to children and grandchildren and can dramatically impact their lives through developmental disorders and dreadful diseases like breast and testicular cancers.
DDT is also one of the most potent obesogens that science has identified. Never heard of obesogens? Neither had I until I really dug into DDT exposure research and found the area of endocrinology research. Obesogens are substances that create obesity that has nothing to do with food/calorie intake. Obesogens are chemicals that in simple terms make you obese and keep you that way regardless of what you eat (caloric intake) or how much or little you eat. There have been around 20 obesogens identified since 2011, and DDT is one of the most potent, and Swisher Sweets are loaded with DDT just like tobacco products have been since the 1950s. You can browse a few examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research on DDT and organochlorine pesticides in cigarettes that virtually ended in the 1970s here and here and here and here and here.
Any guesses how that all might figure into the global obesity and diabetes pandemic? Nobody has connected the dots between DDT and other obesogeic pesticides in tobacco products and the obesity/diabetes because there have never been any studies of pesticides in tobacco products. Does knowing about concealed and unaccounted-for obesogenic pesticides in tobacco products connect any dots in new ways in the obesity and diabetes pandemic picture?
But back to this post on the connection between smoking DDT and developing testicular cancer – what I’m calling cheesy balls which you’ll get when I show you an image of DDT-testicle cancer. Even nanogram-levels of DDT exposure are known to directly and definitively destroy human testicles and sperm and human eggs and developing fetuses as well. DDT is hostile to human life from the very beginning of its development and if just a few molecules of DDT in the mother’s blood and fatty tissues (where it is stored) don’t manage to abort the fertilized egg or then kill and abort the developing fetus then the baby that is born will very likely suffer multiple diseases and conditions that will destroy its life as surely as if it had never been born at all. That’s why DDT is banned worldwide – it is that dangerous at any level.
I’ve linked to the extensive science on what the pesticide contaminants of this and other tobacco product brands are doing to women and girl Sweets Smokers in several recent posts so in this post I want to focus on just one part of DDT’s destructiveness – the sperm damage and testicular cancer that are both established outcomes of fetal DDT exposure as well as lifetime DDT exposure, like through smoking a tobacco product contaminated with DDT. A young guy who starts inhaling the concentration of DDT in Swisher Sweets in his early teens could easily wind up with ‘Cheesy Balls” like these cancerous little nuts shown here in his 20s or 30s.
Think These Young Men Rolling A Blunt Know About What That DDT WILL Do?
Here’s what’s in that blunt the guys are rolling using Swisher Sweets as the wrapper. It’s more than just the DDT that creates a seriously high risk that one or more of these young men will develop that “Cheesy Balls” cancer. The good news is that these guys could just as easily be rolling their Cannabis with an organic tobacco leaf from a dependable online source and – voila – no more risk of cheesy balls and a lot better smoke. But until that happens here’s what they’ll be inhaling.
All the sperm-killing, fetal life-destroying pesticides you see above are all also concealed and unregulated in Swisher Sweets, and since no research scientist anywhere ever thought that people would be inhaling any of them regularly, much less inhaling all of them together, like on contaminated tobacco products, nobody has ever studied what happens. So what we know about what many of these insecticides and fungicides do to human reproductive organs has to be interpreted from what happens to mice and fish testicles and sperm and eggs and babies.
The only real question is – can we take a hint from nature?
Nobody who smokes Swisher Sweets has any idea that they are inhaling a chemical that’s been banned in every country on earth for over 50 years for the strongest possible scientific reasons. That’s why I am so concerned that our private lab tests, the first and only tests of off-the-shelf tobacco products for pesticides since the 1960s, show extremely high 0.816 mg/kg concentrations of DDT in Swisher Sweets, a tobacco product smoked by over 12 million largely young, largely Black, Brown and Native people who we know from a broad universe of studies are disproportionately vulnerable to DDT and the organochlorine pesticides.
If you’re male then even minimal exposure to DDT in your lifetime can destroy your sperm and give you testicular cancer. But your exposure doesn’t have to be from anything you did. Male children whose mothers are exposed to DDT while they are pregnant are also at high risk of testicular cancer in their childhood and teens – along with high risk of damaged sperm, obesity and diabetes. Females exposed to DDT at any time of life but especially while young have multiple kinds of high cancer risk, the most clearly established being breast cancer, as well as high risk of diabetes and obesity. Girls whose mothers were exposed to DDT while pregnant are at very significantly higher risk of obesity and diabetes, as well as at high risk of giving birth to their own boys with damaged sperm and cancerous testicles.
As you can see there’s a lot more to look at in Swisher Sweets than just the DDT, but we’ll start there. Well, I do have to mention that Carbendazim right up front too.
Considering the science below, I’m pretty sure that if young Black and Latino guys who already smoke Swisher Sweets had their sperm tested they would see what is happening to them pretty clearly. Read some of the science below and tell me what you think those young Swisher smokers would find?
High DDT and PCB exposure during adolescence and adulthood is associated with abnormal chromosomes in sperm. Men exposed to certain banned but long-lived chemicals at high levels as teenagers are more likely to have defective sperm later in life, according a new study.
Organochlorine chemicals—specifically DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—may affect how testicles mature and function. It is the first study to examine men’s exposure to the chemicals during the teenage years and abnormal sperm later in life, and suggests that the chemicals—banned in the United States but still lingering in soil, water and people—may contribute to male infertility.
NOTE: These researchers clearly don’t know about tobacco products if they think that ‘lingering traces in soil and water’ is what’s frying all those young human testicles.
Interaction between genetic polymorphism of cytochrome P450-1B1 and environmental pollutants in breast cancer risk
CYP polymorphisms, mediated by long term OCs exposure, activate protein dynamics via allosteric regulation of mitochondria’s electron transport and related metabolic pathways. The framework of all known phenotype and disease gene associations, could be indicative of the common genetic origin of many diseases. Colorectal, pancreatic, hepatic, thyroid, breast cancer, renal cancer and sarcoma are involved in the correlation between OCs exposure and carcinogenicity.
The presence of a CYP1A1 MspI (rs4646903) polymorphism associated with OCs exposure may affect spermatogenesis by modifying the metabolism of androgens. It was concluded that increased DDE-DDT (Dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene-DDT) exposure affects semen motility, concentration and morphology, especially under the existence of CYP1A1 MspI (rs4646903) polymorphism.
Sperm epimutation biomarkers of obesity and pathologies following DDT induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of disease
Environmental Epigenetics, Volume 5, Issue 2, April 2019
Gestating F0 generational female rats were transiently exposed to DDT during fetal gonadal sex determination, and the incidence of adult-onset pathologies was assessed in the subsequent F1, F2, and F3 generations.
There was an increase of testis disease and early-onset puberty in the F2 generation DDT lineage males. The F3 generation males and females had significant increases in the incidence of obesity and multiple disease.
The F3 generation DDT males also had significant increases in testis disease, prostate disease, and late onset puberty. The F3 generation DDT females had increases in ovarian and kidney disease.
Unique sets of DMRs were associated with late onset puberty, prostate disease, kidney disease, testis disease, obesity, and multiple disease pathologies.
Negative effects of serum p,p’-DDE on sperm parameters and modification by genetic polymorphisms
Effects of ambient exposure to DDT and its metabolites (DDE-DDT) on human sperm parameters and the role of genetic polymorphisms in modifying the association were investigated.
High DDE-DDT exposure adversely affected all 3 sperm parameters and its effects were exacerbated by the GSTT1 null polymorphism and by the CYP1A1 common alleles.
Reduced Seminal Parameters Associated With Environmental DDT Exposure and p,p′‐DDE Concentrations in Men in Chiapas, Mexico: A Cross‐Sectional Study
Long‐term exposure to small amounts of organochlorine contaminants leads to the accumulation of considerable burdens in animal and human tissues. Other effects may occur in the young, as they seem to be the most vulnerable (Longnecker et al, 2000). Indeed, it is not the amount of DDT to which a mother is exposed during pregnancy that is critical, but rather her lifetime exposure and bioaccumulation that determines the level of exposure of the fetus and breast‐fed infant (Longnecker et al, 2000; Korrick et al, 2001).
Now let me show you briefly what some of the research on other insecticide/fungicide contaminants that Swisher Sweets smokers are inhaling and please remember – they are human beings being exposed to all of these together, not in isolated lab experiments on mice and fish.
The Neonicotinoid Insecticide Imidacloprid: A Male Reproductive System Toxicity Inducer-Human and Experimental Study
Conclusion: Toxic effects to male reproductive system can be considered as an outcome of IMI exposure and infertility problems can be expected in chronically exposed subjects.
MY COMMENT: Sounds pretty definite when they say ‘problems can be expected.’
Reproductive effects consisted of increased vacuolization and decreased weight of the epididymides, decreased sperm counts and motility, and abnormal sperm morphology.
MY COMMENT: translation: crippled puny little guys with no get up and go
Research suggests pyrethroids may inhibit production of an enzyme necessary for the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT is necessary for the proper function of multiple accessory sex glands, including the seminal vesicles and prostate, as well as the epididymedes.
“The evidence generated in lab animals over the last 10 years or so demonstrates rather convincingly that pyrethroids are potent endocrine disruptors and do cause malfunctioning in DHT-dependent organs.”
MY COMMENT: Who has stronger testicles – a stud bull or a teenage boy? And so if a little Bifenthrin in their feed is for big bad bull balls, what is a little bifenthrin in their smokes going to do to even big bad guy balls?
“Considering all the evidence that human male reproduction is exhibiting troubling secular trends (sperm count and quality, hypospadias, cryptorchidism, testis cancer), this is highly troubling,”
MY COMMENT: “Highly troubling” – my guess is that’s putting it mildly in street terms
Carbendazim-induced alterations of reproductive development and function in the rat and hamster
MBC treatment markedly altered sperm morphology, testicular and epididymal weights, and sperm numbers and testicular histology. Fertility, sperm motility, and hormonal levels were altered, primarily in the males with very low sperm counts.
MY COMMENT: Looks like Carbendzim is pretty good at rat & hamster birth control by lowering sperm count. Sounds like it might be kinda tough on those little testicles.
Cypermethrin reversibly alters sperm count without altering fertility in mice
Administration of cypermethrin … caused a significant reduction in epididymal spermatozoa count and an increase in abnormal spermatozoa count when compared to controls.
MY COMMENT: Kinda sounds like you wouldn’t want to ‘administer’ that to yourself doesn’t it?
Reproductive capacity was significantly affected by exposure to the herbicide; a time lag of more than five weeks was observed for egg maturation in contaminated females and high bioconcentrations of pendimethalin were measured in eggs and sperm. Chemical transfer from genitors to offspring via gametes may affect embryo development and negatively impact the early stages of development
MY COMMENT: It goes after both sperm and eggs, leaving ‘high concentrations”. So if I’m inhaling pendimethalin 200-300 puffs a day, that could be quite risky couldn’t it?
So dear reader, there you are. The entire regulatory apparatus of the US Federal government, that spends tens of billions a year on “smoking prevention” and “research”, has somehow managed to completely ignore this massive assault on people’s health and lives for generations. Zero research. Zero publications. Zero programs. Zero regulation. Could this simply be an oversight? Of course not. It is much more likely that this is an actual, real conspiracy – not a conspiracy theory.
Pesticide contamination of tobacco products causes much if not most most of the 500,000 American deaths and 7,000,000 worldwide deaths not from smoking tobacco but from smoking contaminated tobacco products, and multiple agencies of the US government are fully complicit. They have had institutional knowledge of this situation for over 50 years and have done absolutely nothing. I realize that it is because the Tobacco Cartel has these agencies all completely tied up as far as being able to do anything but agencies like FDA are actually acting as allies of the Cartel. The 2015 lawsuit that forced American Spirit organic cigarettes to put a warning on their pack that organic tobacco does not mean a safer smoke is a deliberate lie, based on ZERO SCIENCE, hatched by an inter-agency conspiracy, that is INTENDED to keep smokers from saving their own health and lives by switching to organic tobacco products. There must be trans-generational accountability in both the US government and the Tobacco Cartel.
New Harvard Medical School research that says that for every10 nanograms of DDT per gram of serum in a pregnant mother’s blood her chances of a spontaneous abortion rise 17%. I will show you how a young smoker reaches that level of DDT in her blood after only a few weeks of smoking one or two Swisher Sweets little cigars a day, and the hard science that says her risk of losing a baby just builds from there.
This might seem academic to most of us because DDT has been banned worldwide for nearly 70 years, so how could a pregnant girl or woman possibly be exposed to enough DDT to cause her to lose her baby? And how could this be happening to many thousands of young women without anyone being aware of it?
I will show you hard facts, straightforward calculations and hyperlinks to the published science just below. 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, is very likely causing hundreds of thousands of these deceptively named “Spontaneous Abortions”. I don’t see these children’s lives cut short by a manufacturer’s greed and negligence as ‘spontaneous’ anything. – do you? 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.
I’ll show you hard data just below that demonstrates that every Swisher Sweet little cigar a young girl or woman smokes delivers @163 nanograms of DDT to the smoker’s blood. Because DDT is so persistent in her body, the amount of illegal, banned worldwide DDT in one Swisher Sweet a day can increase her chances of miscarrying the baby by over 200% before she even knows she’s pregnant or, far more tragic, can result in a mentally and physically damaged baby at birth.
Roughly two million women, mostly young, African-American, Latin American and Native American smoke Swisher Sweets regularly which puts them at high risk of spontaneous abortion and miscarriage early in any pregnancy because of the DDT they are inhaling with every fruity little puff. (See data tables below on how much and why)
We know that hundreds of thousands of these @2 million female Swisher Sweet smokers will get pregnant at least once before they are 25. The data suggest that perhaps 500,000 out of the 2 million of these smokers will get pregnant and lose their babies at least once before age 25, and most won’t even know it because it will happen in the first few weeks of pregnancy. That’s when DDT is most effective at destroying the rapidly dividing cells of early developing life -early in the pregnancy.
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 – birth defects, miscarriages, developmental problems. Countless little lives ruined from the outset – for what?
Could this at least partly explain why so many young women in marginalized communities, where sweet, fruity and minty smokes are so heavily promoted, 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.
Here’s the math. The 0.816 mg/kg found in the “Smoke No Evil” tests translates to 816,000 nanograms per kilogram of Swisher Sweets.
Since each little cigar is about 2 grams, that translates to 1634 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 was suppressed) show that @ 10% of the DDT in cigarettes is inhaled by the smoker. So we can assume that smokers are absorbing @163 nanograms of the total DDT in each Swisher Sweet they smoke, that amount will enter the lungs and then the bloodstream of the smoker.
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 it’s stored in fat cells that it causes the body to make. That’s the link to obesity. Those same 1960s studies looked at the amount of DDT exhaled and it turned out to be virtually none. 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 +/-163 nanograms of DDT will enter the bloodstream of the girl or women smoker. 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%.
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.
DDT targets living reproductive systems, and doesn’t discriminate between bugs and humans. It will abort babies regardless, and the more of it there is in the blood or tissues, the greater the likelihood of abortion. 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 intent here, and conspiracy.
Smokers can continue to 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 – again.
This atrocity is 100% the result of government agency and legislative cowardice and negligence, criminal corporate greed, and what looks to me like a clear eugenics agenda.
Two million+ young Black, Brown and Native American women and their unborn female children are at extreme risk of breast cancer, a risk that reaches across generations even to granddaughters.This atrocity is totally hidden and completely ignored by government regulators, and its deadly crippling impact on marginalized people and communities of color is much, much greater than on the privileged classes and races.
Here’s the situation. Young Black, Brown and Native American girls and women who smoke the little cigar brand Swisher Sweets are radically increasing their risk for breast cancer, and their unborn daughter’s risk as well. This is because we know for a fact the women and girls who smoke Swishers are being exposed to @700X the highest concentration of DDT found in any other US consumer product. We know this because I commissioned testing of a small group of major brands in 2018 and little cigars/Swisher Sweets came back with the most extreme levels of contamination (see data below).
The DDT you see in the table below, all 0.816 mg/kg of it, is fresh, potent, and highly reactive, not just trace soil or water residuals from 50 years ago. It was sprayed directly, heavily and very recentlyon the tobacco used to make Swisher Sweets. There is a total worldwide ban on the use of DDT on crops, by the way. That’s another story, which I document in my book “Smoke No Evil“.
So, here’s why that DDT in Swisher Sweets makes the fact that they are actively marketed to Black, Brown and Native American youth a mega-RICO criminal activity. Because Black, Brown and Native American people are genetically more vulnerable to DDT and neurochemicals and endocrine-disruptors than people with Northern European and Asian genetics, the resulting damage from their deliberate addiction to these fruity little cigars is much more profound. I believe that the heavy marketing of these contaminated tobacco products to marginalized young people can be called genocidal, but at a minimum it is criminal. So, here is the DDT, fungicide and insecticide exposure that smokers of Swisher Sweets are experiencing.
Google any of these neurochemicals and EDCs and see what you find.
Let me start with some amazing and well-crafted information on DDT and Breast Cancer from the Breast Cancer Prevention Partners Website that NAILS exactly why young girls and women who smoke Swisher Sweets are increasing their risk of breast cancer and the lifelong threat to their children.
“Who is most vulnerable to the health effects of DDT and DDE?“
“DDT exposures seem to have the most profound consequences when they occur during critical periods of breast development, including prenatal development, childhood, puberty and pregnancy.[25],[26]“
“DDT and DDE cross the placenta, and prenatal exposure appears to increase risk of breast cancer in adulthood.[27] Some of the highest concentrations of DDT and DDE in humans have been found in breast milk, which also makes breast-feeding infants at risk of DDT and DDE exposure.[28],[29] In general, however, the benefits of breast-feeding still outweigh the risks.”
“Timing, Duration & Pattern“
“For many years it was believed that the harmful effects of all toxic chemicals increased with an increasing dose or exposure, and that there was a low threshold dose below which there was no harmful effect. It was also assumed that both adults and children responded similarly to toxic exposures. Scientific evidence now shows that some chemicals, especially endocrine disrupting compounds, can exert negative effects at extremely low levels of exposure, sometimes with more serious or different effects than at higher doses. The timing, duration and pattern of exposure are just as important as the dose. While it’s good to limit exposure to toxic chemicals and radiation at every stage of life, it is even more important during critical periods, including gestation, childhood and pregnancy.”
“Low Dose Effects” (critical understanding of the DDT threat here)
“Except in cases of accidental or occupational exposures, most exposures to chemicals are at “very low doses.” Most chemical safety studies look at the toxic effects of higher doses of chemicals and then assume decreasing toxicity with lower doses. Yet substances that disrupt the body’s own hormones — known as endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs)—can exert important biological effects at low doses – including those at which they are found in the everyday environment. These effects are often qualitatively different from those found in traditional toxicology experiments. Low-dose effects are especially likely in developing tissues, during the formative periods when even minuscule levels of naturally occurring hormones determine the normal course of development.[1] EDC effects are often strongest at low doses at developmental stages when the complex hormonal regulation has not yet been established.[2]
I hope that by now you’re interested in the science behind my assertion that this atrocity is actually happening in plain sight. First, please visit the Breast Cancer Prevention Partners website and spend time learning what they have to share – this website offers a lot of very well-researched and well-crafted information on the consequences of even ultra-low dose DDT exposure along with every kind of environmental chemical exposure related to breast cancer – many of which are bundled right along with DDT in Swishers and lots of other brands we haven’t been able to test yet.
Here’s a loosely-curated selection of key research that supports the imperative that the contamination of tobacco products with neurochemicals and ECDs must end. Making this all the more imperative is that the industry has demonstrated that it can produce a low-residue and even organic tobacco cigarette. That means that none of this suffering and death, even unto future generations, need not happen. I believe the solution is awareness more than legislation and hope that you, dear reader, can find a way to help raise that awareness.
DDT and Breast Cancer: Prospective Study of Induction Time and Susceptibility Windows
Conclusions: p, p’-DDT was associated with breast cancer through age 54 years. Risk depended on timing of first exposure and diagnosis age, suggesting susceptibility windows and an induction period beginning in early life. DDT appears to be an endocrine disruptor with responsive breast targets from in utero to menopause
Evidence has accumulated for several chemicals that environmental factors have a stronger effect on breast cancer risk when exposure occurred early in life. The insecticide, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, is an excellent example and is just one of several chemicals for which there seems to be both animal and human evidence for the developmental basis of adult disease.
High levels of serum p,p′–DDT predicted a statistically significant 5-fold increased risk of breast cancer among women who were born after 1931. These women were under 14 years of age in 1945, when DDT came into widespread use, and mostly under 20 years as DDT use peaked. Women who were not exposed to p,p′–DDT before 14 years of age showed no association between p,p′–DDT and breast cancer (p = 0.02 for difference by age).
Conclusions
Exposure to p,p′–DDT early in life may increase breast cancer risk. Many U.S. women heavily exposed to DDT in childhood have not yet reached 50 years of age. The public health significance of DDT exposure in early life may be large.
Ancestral dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) exposure promotes epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of obesity
Ancestral environmental exposures to a variety of environmental factors and toxicants have been shown to promote the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult onset disease. The present work examined the potential transgenerational actions of the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) on obesity and associated disease.
Conclusions
Observations indicate ancestral exposure to DDT can promote obesity and associated disease transgenerationally. The etiology of disease such as obesity may be in part due to environmentally induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance.
Interaction between genetic polymorphism of cytochrome P450-1B1 and environmental pollutants in breast cancer risk
CYP polymorphisms, mediated by long term OCs exposure, activate protein dynamics via allosteric regulation of mitochondria’s electron transport [70] and related metabolic pathways [71].
The framework of all known phenotype and disease gene associations, could be indicative of the common genetic origin of many diseases. Colorectal, pancreatic, hepatic, thyroid, breast cancer, renal cancer and sarcoma are involved in the correlation between OCs exposure and carcinogenicity.
The presence of a CYP1A1 MspI (rs4646903) polymorphism associated with OCs exposure may affect spermatogenesis by modifying the metabolism of androgens. It was concluded that increased DDE-DDT (Dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene-DDT) exposure affects semen motility, concentration and morphology, especially under the existence of CYP1A1 MspI (rs4646903) polymorphism.
Finally, to make the point that it isn’t only smokers of Swishers who are at risk, here are a few more of the brands I was able to get tested in 2018 for the “Smoke No Evil” trials.
Marlboros don’t have any DDT! Yay! Or Camels either! Yippee! We’re safe! Aren’t we?
This post is to share hard factual evidence connecting hidden and unregulated pesticide contaminants in Swisher Sweets like DDT, Carbendazim, and Cypermethrin, and the multiple terrible birth defects like holoprosencephaly these so-called “Tobacco products” are inflicting on the children and even grandchildren of smokers. I’ll provide more links below to published journal research that connects Black, Brown and Native American birth defects with these hidden and unregulated pesticides in tobacco products. First a brief look at why these pesticides are doing such damage.
One all too-common, pesticide-caused birth defect (1 in 250 embryos) occurs when a developing embryo’s “Sonic Hedgehog Gene” is attacked and damaged by specific pesticides. In spite of its weird name. this gene is a true Mother Gene – it controls the creation of the human body from the time the embryo is only a few dividing cells. It does this by secreting a complex protein called “Sonic Hedgehog” that guides the developing embryo through all the incredibly complex cell divisions it takes for the embryo to become a human being instead of a fish or a cat or a firefly. This Mother Gene secretes just right version of the Sonic Hedgehog protein at the right moment to biochemically message the right cells in the developing embryo – “hey – become two eyes right there”, “OK – make five fingers here and here”, and “Listen up – become a brain stem!” – important little details like that. When it all goes right, a wonderful healthy human baby is born.
When pesticides attack this gene, the crucial Sonic Hedgehog protein is damaged, and some of the cellular pathways to becoming fully human are now destroyed for that baby, who will never be whole even if they are born at all.
When a young girl or woman smokes a commercial cigarette or little cigar, specific pesticides known to attack and destroy the Sonic Hedgehog gene in human embryos flood her system and circulate in her blood. That’s the simple reality. What happens to that developing baby then is pretty straight science, which I’ll show you. First, to set the stage, here are the pesticides in Swisher Sweets and other tobacco product brands known to attack, damage and destroy the Sonic Hedgehog gene.
The Sonic Hedgehog” gene controls human “morphogenesis” – literally the creation, or genesis of the human body. This gene is responsible for creating the body of the baby from the first instant out of those first few cells that start dividing and becoming. We know for sure that the Sonic Hedgehog can be damaged and destroyed by very low levels of the pesticides that we also know for sure are hidden contaminants of Swisher Sweets. Every pesticide listed above attacks and damages the human embryo’s Sonic Hedgehog gene; imagine the impact when they all attack at once, like a frenzied pack of wild dogs, with every puff.
Now The Really Damaging Connection
BUT – its not enough that the pesticides in Swishers attack the Sonic Hedgehog to directly cause this terrible birth defect. Holoprosencephaly also is caused by maternal diabetes – in fact a Mom with diabetes is 200X more likely to have a damaged baby.
And guess what – pesticide exposure is very strongly linked to Diabetes, and smokers have a very high rate of Diabetes. (more links below) So the DDT and Carbendazim and the other hidden, unregulated fungicides and insecticides attack the baby’s Mother Gene directly, and also cause Mom to have Diabetes, which also attacks the Mother Gene. That baby and mother are at totally preventable terminal risk.
“We now know that smoking causes type 2 diabetes.” (CDC)
Notice that CDC says ‘smoking’ not ‘smoking tobacco’ – that’s just a small example of the duplicity of these agencies. Here’s why:
If “smoking” includes inhaling pesticides, then duh. We already know for sure that exposure to pesticides causes Type 2 Diabetes. But CDC never mentions pesticides in ‘tobacco’ products. Never. At all. CDC wants everyone to connect ‘smoking’ and ‘diabetes” without knowing anything about ‘pesticides’ in tobacco products. If smokers did know, then pesticide exposure causing Type 2 Diabetes could easily avoided by switching to organic tobacco products until/if quitting became an option. But CDC evidently wants people to either quit or die.
So here’s what that Diabetic pregnant Mom who loves her Swishers is carefully conditioned by Swisher’s expensive, heavy advertising and their planted street memes to think is coming ….
But here is what may actually be coming. With apologies for the shocking images – do you see any cute little Swisher babies here?
In a Swisher Smokin’ Mommy, DDT and all those other insecticides and fungicides you see in the Swishers data will be circulating in her blood at exactly the right moment to damage her baby’s Sonic Hedgehog. That DDT is bioaccumulative too, so it builds up in her tissues. It will eventually likely cause breast cancer. It is also an obesogen, so it will definitely make her fatter because DDT needs fat cells for storage.
So every young Swisher smoker’s blood is always full of DDT and a dozen other neurotoxic pesticides, all ready to target any new embryo’s Sonic Hedgehog gene. There are @ 2 million young girls and women just in the US who smoke Swishers regularly. Every one is at severe risk. It doesn’t matter if she’s pregnant right now – as long as she keeps smoking, that little Sonic Hedgehog is toast any time it pops up its little head.
Not surprisingly, birth defects associated with exposure of fetal life to neurotoxic pesticides are extremely high in marginalized communities, where high proportions of young women smoke tobacco products like Swisher Sweets, that are highly contaminated with many of exactly the same pesticides known to cause these terribly damaged babies.
Because nobody since roughly 1975 has published research on pesticides in tobacco products, and since my 2018 “Smoke No Evil” data is still unknown, at least one highly probable cause of holoprosencephaly in the children of smokers in these marginalized and exploited communities isn’t realized by anyone and therefore can’t begin to be be addressed. Here’s some pretty simple hard evidence – don’t you think this might be worth some Public Health attention?
The “Sonic Hedgehog” was named by the quirky scientists who discovered it in the early 80s. This gene basically regulates key processes in the developing embryo all the way from when it’s deciding whether to become a frog or a human and then when it’s deciding how many fingers and eyes to grow and where to put them, and so on. The Sonic HedgeHog gene does all this by sending coded biochemical messages to all the millions of cells whose growth has to be coordinated so they become that first cute little baby you see above – the mythical “Swisher Baby”.
Not all Sonic Hedgehog damage is terminally tragic – since 1 in 250 human embryos experience some level of damage there are many babies born who go on to lead their lives while carrying the burden laid upon them before they were born. Like these young people. Do any of them or their brothers and sisters in victimhood live in your community? Would you like to see this tragedy end? There is a simple solution. Force tobacco product manufacturers to remove pesticide residues from their products. That’s it. Forget any issues with tobacco, nicotine, or smoking. Deal with the pesticides first, then see what happens to young people who smoke pesticide-free tobacco. I have a pretty good hunch what we’ll find.
And as you and I cringe at the images and try to deal with the idea that this is being done to children every day in order to extract money from them, we have to remember that this massive lifelong suffering is the consequence of the reckless act of profit-hungry manufacturers acting with certain knowledge that their product is contaminated with these pesticides. By virtue of their industry position, and their membership in CORESTA, they either know or ought to know the consequences of inhalation of the pesticides that contaminate their tobacco products. They ought also to be aware that the genetics of Black, Latinx and Native American people are particularly vulnerable – and of course, they are. The Tobacco industry calls young Black and Brown kids “replacement smokers” and that’s exactly what they are – replacements.
This is an industry so ready for accountability – once there is even a little crack in their dam of silence it will explode with worldwide genocide trials and global confiscation of assets that will reach into some of the wealthiest families and institutions in the world. After all, Tobacco wealth built America and much of the rest of the “modern” world. Those massively wealthy families are still there, invisible, protected – they think. I may not see it, but their time of accountability will come. The evidence is just too strong and too vast, although still too hidden with vast cleverness in plain sight. When the world can see the extent of the Tobacco wealth built on a hundreds of years of the exploitation, suffering and death of smokers then literally trillions in hoarded Tobacco treasure will be surfaced and can be reclaimed for the public good. It is wasted, unproductive privately held and stoutly protected wealth, supporting the indulgent worthless lives of largely incompetent unproductive people with love only for themselves. This ill-gotten gain, going back decades, has left a trail of evidence in spite of its very very best efforts. It’s the 50 year total gap in research that gives away the Tobacco industry’s screaming nightmare concern. It was around 1975 when the lid was clamped on hard and universally on cigarette pesticide research, around the world and not just in the US. And boy are those early studies out of NCSU an eye-opener on what pesticides smokers were inhaling in the 1950s and 60s. These are the same folks who, if they haven’t yet died of “smoking related disease”, are dying now from all those years of inhaling what you see in these long buried old reports. 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.
Every organochlorine in the book was present in cigarettes of the period, and the organophosphates were coming on heavy then too. (Remember that in 1960s detection technology was not well-developed.) The level of contamination has only gotten worse in the years since the industry clamped down on research, and my “Smoke No Evil” tests in 2018 strongly suggest.
Then after the mid-1970s – nothing. It all stopped – the data, not the pesticides. There had been dozens of studies from the early 1950s through the 60s at NCSU and elsewhere documenting high concentrations of these incredible supertoxins – and suddenly oops – that all stopped. That’s the smoking gun – no research on pesticides in cigarettes anywhere on earth since the industry realized what the data actually showed. It showed neurotoxic, carcinogenic, genotoxic levels of multiple pesticides, dozens of them in fact, that smokers were inhaling every puff. Not one more study, when the tobacco industry continued to be the largest user of pesticides per acre of any crop on earth. Nada. That says pure, coordinated, global conspiracy to me – how about you? In case you missed this earlier, 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.
I hope that I’ve been able to help bring a reckoning to those at the top of this cold, inhuman conspiracy. I have only a few treasured illusions, like for instance that you, dear reader, may be in a position to pick up the phone and make something begin to happen. Maybe a nice little class action lawsuit on behalf of any one of the very identifiable classes of people whose lives have been irreparably damaged by the conspirators. And by the way, responsibility and accountability for this slow-rolling, trans-generational atrocity includes all the Federal agencies who have known the cold, hard facts since the research was shut down – they’ve chosen to lie, dissimulate and keep silent for decades, either out of fear or greed – hard to say. Their only “Report” on tobacco pesticides in the early 2000s was a puke on American smokers and their families, designed to shield the tobacco industry, period. I’m just an old guy sitting at a little desk early on a cold morning in Portland Oregon writing these words that I hope will be heard like the prayer they are meant to be. So thank you dear reader for picking this up and reading it all the way to the end of the line. May God welcome Roy Orbison who gave voice to so many souls.
If you are Diabetic who smokes, or if you care about someone who does, there is a new connection between smoking and Diabetes you should know about. The CDC says that 25% of people with Type 2 Diabetes are smokers, and every one of them is experiencing severe harm that is 100% preventable with a simple behavioral change that is not only not difficult – for any smoker it will be easy. With 32,000,000 people in the US diagnosed with Type 2, that means that 7,000,000 smokers are at risk from this unique, unrecognized threat. If you or someone you know is Diabetic and had a mother who smoked, you also may want to have this information. In this post I’ll give you links to published journal research evidence that this threat is real and that points to serious, 100% preventable harm being done to millions of Diabetics who smoke any brand of cigarette, but especially cheap cigarettes and those sweet, fruity little cigars. The hidden connection between smoking and Type 2 Diabetes is simple to point out but needs then needs some explanation.
Here it is. It begins with DDT. The hidden connection between smoking and Diabetes lies in contamination by insecticides, fungicides, neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors like DDT a specific heavy contaminant of Swisher Sweets little cigars smoked by millions of young people. DDT is totally banned worldwide and has no business being in anything that millions of Diabetics are smoking every day. The other pesticide chemicals you see below, each in its own way represent magnification of the threat posed by the heavy-hitters like DDT and Carbendazim.
Now please let me show you more links and hard data that back up this statement of fact – we know that smoking causes Type 2 Diabetes, and while some of this damage may be due to smoking tobacco, how much may be due to this toxic array of hidden bioactive chemicals, every one of which is designed to destroy life one way or another?
2. We also know for a fact that specific pesticide exposures including DDT and several other identified pesticides in Tobacco Cartel products cause Diabetes in newborn children, teens and adults. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/collections/45847338/
But here’s the problem – one that’s injuring and killing a lot of people. What no smoker knows, and what no doctors evidently know, is that cigarettes and cigars are loaded with exactly the same insecticides and fungicides that Diabetes journal research, plus CDC, FDA and EPA all point to as CAUSING Diabetes.
So smoking isn’t “linked to” or “associated with” Diabetes. It causes Diabetes. So do pesticides. Full stop.
So we have smoking causing Diabetes, and inhaling pesticides causing Diabetes. Could it be that what is actually causing Diabetes in smokers, and is sickening and killing millions of smokers (and their children by the way), is that nobody has a clue that Diabetic smokers are doing both, and are preventably suffering and dying because of it. Could switching to organic tobacco cigarettes as a first step to possibly quitting make a measurable difference in the health of diabetic smokers? I say yes it could, and why not try it?
Here’s a very small sample of pesticide/Diabetes research:
So how about a little discussion of these simple facts.
Many of us already know that smoking is proven to radically increase the risk of developing Diabetes, and to make diabetes worse. As we saw, the American CDC says “Smoking causes diabetes” Not just “associated with” Diabetes or “linked to” Diabetes. Smoking causes Diabetes.
OK. But smoking what, and why is it causing Diabetes? Nobody seems to be asking the question. The answer may be very important to smokers with Diabetes, whose cigarettes and cigars are loaded with unregulated and even banned pesticides in concentrations known to cause Diabetes through chronic exposure – like through smoking, for example. Problem is, not one MD in the world appears to know that the Diabetic smoker they’re treating is being exposed to pesticides several hundred times a day. You have to wonder how many of the “complications” of smoking in Diabetics are actually consequences of pesticide exposure. The docs are seeing the consequences, and the patient is sure experiencing them, and they both think they know what’s causing it – the “tobacco”. Except – many cigarette brands aren’t actually tobacco. And even if smoking tobacco causes Diabetes – which nobody in the world has ever actually tested since they all use industry-supplied cigarettes, never organic tobacco, for all their ‘science‘ – that still leaves the question of what inhaling that cocktail of pesticides you see in the data below is doing to the smoker. Well, we actually do know that because if the smoker were not a smoker but was somehow inhaling that same mix of pesticides you see in the tables below from somewhere, hundreds of times a day, my guess is that the pesticide/diabetes science would apply. They would be at very high risk to get Diabetes, right?
So here’s my question – if we know for sure that exposure to pesticides causes Diabetes, which we do, and if we know for sure that smoking causes Diabetes, which we do, and with hard data from the “Smoke No Evil” cigarette/pesticide tests in 2018 (see the data below) we also know that smokers are inhaling a cocktail of pesticides with every puff. So here’s a question for everyone from smokers to doctors to families to public health authorities – what would happen if Diabetic smokers kept right on smoking but switched to organic tobacco cigarettes and therefore stopped inhaling pesticides? Will Diabetics who smoke still sicken and die as quickly, or at all if they switch to smoking organic tobacco?
Diabetics who smoke are clearly at increased risk of death if they contract COVID19 at the same time that their immune system is being destroyed by insecticides and fungicides with every cigarette puff. Could a simple switch to pesticide-free cigarettes or RYO save at least some lives?
Those aren’t such dumb questions once you take a look at the science. There are dozens of peer-reviewed articles that support the causal link between pesticide exposure and diabetes, just like there are hundreds supporting the causal link between smoking and diabetes. Like these.
Smoking and Incidence of Diabetes Among U.S. Adults
Findings from the Insulin Resistance Atherosclerosis Study
RESULTS—Of current smokers, 96 (25%) developed diabetes at 5 years, compared with 60 (14%) never smokers. After multivariable adjustment, current smokers exhibited increased incidence of diabetes compared with never smokers (odds ratio [OR] 2.66, P = 0.001). Similar results were found among current smokers with ≥20 pack-years with normal glucose tolerance (5.66, P = 0.001).
CONCLUSIONS—Smoking shares a robust association with incident diabetes, supporting the current Surgeon General’s warnings against cigarette smoking.
Now let’s look at the relationship between pesticide exposure and Diabetes. Same conclusions. Remarkable isn’t it? There’s much much more.
“After reviewing 21 previous studies, researchers found exposure to any type of pesticide was associated with a 61 percent increased risk for any type of diabetes. The increased risk for type 2 diabetes — the most common type — was 64 percent, the investigators found.”
We identified 22 studies assessing the association between pesticides and diabetes. The summary OR for the association of top vs. bottom tertile of exposure to any type of pesticide and diabetes was 1.58 (95% CI: 1.32–1.90, p = 1.21 × 10− 6), with large heterogeneity (I2 = 66.8%). Studies evaluating Type 2 diabetes in particular (n = 13 studies), showed a similar summary effect comparing top vs. bottom tertiles of exposure: 1.61 (95% CI 1.37–1.88, p = 3.51 × 10− 9) with no heterogeneity (I2 = 0%). Analysis by type of pesticide yielded an increased risk of diabetes for DDE, heptachlor, HCB, DDT, and trans-nonachlor or chlordane.
The Smoking Gun
So – here’s graphic evidence of the reason for the causal links between smoking and Diabetes. Google any one of these and any of the major symptoms of Diabetes or any Diabetes-related condition. Browse the science. And remember – just because you see “trace” doesn’t mean that chemical isn’t highly bioactive even below the limits of detection.
Please check this link: solid new science tells us that a trace is all it takes of many new pesticides. They don’t depend on dosage for firepower. They are 100% stealthy by design and even a few molecules on-target on-time will do the job on any endocrine system or any nervous system or any reproductive system of any living creature.
(The Journal) Toxicology
“Toxic effects of pesticide mixtures at a molecular level: their relevance to human health”
IMO this is a “sound the alarm, all hands on deck” situation. This is a public health emergency on or above the scale of COVID in terms of suffering and death that could be ended virtually overnight with simple legislation setting regulatory limits on pesticides in tobacco products and incentivizing the production of organic tobacco rather than continuing the futile – but highly lucrative – effort to eradicate smoking.
Conclusions
So – without going into an exhaustive review of the science, which I am working on for a new chapter in “Smoke No Evil”, let me just say that I wanted to publish these ideas now, as I am developing them, so that in case anyone reads this who cares, this long-concealed causal link is now out in the open. There’s a lot more science than I present here behind both parts of this mysterious gap in knowledge. A lot of people who are being badly injured by smoking could be helped if they only knew enough to make their own decision to switch to organic tobacco. I doubt that many doctors, who are among the most effectively brainwashed people when it comes to Tobacco, would ever recommend switching to smoking organic, which is easy and effective, rather than quitting, which is difficult and ineffective. Go figure.
Please share this and help raise awareness that there may be a new path through the wilderness of Diabetes, at least for smokers.
It is such a simple proposition – if you are diabetic and you smoke, before you go through the agony of trying to quit, why not just switch to organic tobacco cigarettes for one month and see how you feel and equally important see how your numbers are looking.
panaceachronicles 