“(B) ADDITIONAL SPECIAL RULE.—Beginning 2 years after the date of enactment of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a tobacco product manufacturer shall not use tobacco, including foreign grown tobacco, that contains a pesticide chemical residue that is at a level greater than is specified by any tolerance applicable under Federal law to domestically grown tobacco.“
Presumably if the tolerance was zero, like with totally banned DDT and many of the other pesticides you see in the data below, then the law would apply. Zero tolerance, right? No US manufacturer can use foreign-grown tobacco contaminated with DDT, and many of the other pesticide residues you see here like Carbendazim – totally banned in the EU. So what’s this data and why has FDA allowed this illegal and dangerous exposure to go on for years without a single move to intervene? I know for a fact that they know exactly what is happening, and I’ll leave it to you to decide why the FDA, CDC, EPA, FTC and every other government agency refuses to regulate the Tobacco Cartel’s products.
Who’s smoking those Swisher Sweets, and why do you suppose the diabetes, obesity and hypertension in those communities are so extreme?
Search “exposure” to any of the pesticides in that table along with keywords diabetes, obesity or hypertension and you’ll find out. And here’s one clue as to where that DDT is going and what it’s doing to smokers.
“Correlates of organochlorine pesticide plasma concentrations among reproductive-aged black women“
“… prospective cohort study of Black women aged 23–35 years from the Detroit, Michigan metropolitan area (enrolled 2010–2012), examined correlates of plasma concentrations of the following OCPs: dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (p,pʹ-DDE), hexachlorobenzene (HCB), oxychlordane, and trans-nonachlor.”
“Current smoking was associated with 10–19% higher plasma concentrations of all four OCPs, and was highest for current smokers of ≥10 cigarettes/day (% differences ranged from 22 to 29%).”
This group of young Black women smokers is exactly the target market for the Swisher Sweets you see in the data above.
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In case this situation has your attention you may be interested in looking into it further. Here are some of my recent posts linking the data to published research on the results of chronic exposure to these pesticides.
This post offers hard evidence and historic documentation of the conspiratorial role of Federal agencies in concealing the health threat to smokers created by unregulated pesticide exposure
This post offers a look at the historical origins of today’s breast cancer, diabetes and obesity epidemics in the trans-generational impact of DDT and Organochlorine pesticide contaminants in cigarettes 1950-1972, and the current state of DDT in tobacco products in 2021
This post links new hard data on pesticide contaminants in cigarettes with the elevated health risks this creates for Diabetic smokers, and the simple strategy that individual smokers can use to eliminate the threat.
A radical “quit smoking” plan that will probably offend a lot of non-smokers but that could help a lot of Diabetic smokers quit hurting themselves without having to quit.
This post links hard data on DDT in Swisher Sweets brand of little cigars, smoked by millions of young women, with peer-reviewed published research on pre-natal genetic damage to the baby
This post links hard data on hidden fungicides in tobacco brands popular in marginalized communities with peer-reviewed published research that demonstrates that exposure to these same fungicides is strongly associated with testicular cancer
Any exposure to several of the pesticides shown to contaminate tobacco products are proven to have greater impact on babies with Latinx, African American, American Indian and Pacific Island genetics.
Could the unexplained link between smoking and suicide be explained by the known link between pesticide exposure and suicide, once you become aware of the concealed pesticide contamination in cigarettes?
There’s nothing spontaneous if a young smoker loses her baby because the insecticides and fungicides in her cigarettes have interrupted fetal development creating ‘non-viable offspring’ doing to her what they are designed to do to bugs.
When a pregnant woman is exposed to DDT during a critical time window in her female baby’s development that female baby will have 4X greater risk of developing breast cancer if she is Black or Brown-skinned.
Once you know about the hidden pesticides communities can use existing toxic substances laws to ban the most dangerous brands and force compliance by the rest.
On this 4/20 day of celebration, 50 years after I published “Cultivators Handbook”, I have a breakthrough organic cigarette concept to offer to the community. It could change the way people access and smoke organic tobacco (and maybe cannabis) and it is so simple it hurts.
I’ve figured out how to make and sell 100% USDA certified organic tobacco cigarettes, real cigarettes in every way, that will sell for less than half of what smokers are paying now for ordinary (and highly contaminated) name-brand factory smokes, and to do it in a way that completely eliminates Federal tobacco product regulation AND taxation.
There’s no interpretation of obscure regulations involved, no iffy jailhouse lawyer legalisms, no depending on the definition of what is, is – just a giant gaping loophole in Federal tobacco regulations that has been totally overlooked. This plan is dead simple and is 100% worked out – it doesn’t actually need much work or money to implement and it will be self-funding almost from launch. It will change the way people smoke Organic Tobacco (and CBD Cannabis too), and if done right it will get very big, very strong, very fast.
It will also cut the legs out from under the Tobacco Cartel, their silent partners the Feds, and their useful idiots the anti-tobacco, anti-everything moralists, who will all be helpless to stop it. That will be so much fun.
(Of course, I could be totally wrong here and making a fool of myself with this announcement – but I don’t think so and anyway I don’t care.)
I’ve managed to do this kind of thing before – twice in my life. So if I’m right this would be #3.
I’m pretty sure this is an idea whose time is right, right now. But also right now I’m almost 80 and probably don’t have enough time left, and certainly don’t have the energy or resources, to make this happen so this needs to be in younger hands. But only the right hands. So I’m putting out a call. Here’s the explanation, and the deal.
The entire concept depends on a single, simple breakthrough realization. An “aha” experience. It’s happened to me before.
It happened years ago and resulted in the Cultivators Handbook of Marijuana. It was 1968. Things were gnarly for many of my dope growing brothers and sisters. I was bummed and scared too. Then one day a friend helped me I realize I didn’t have to actually grow Marijuana anymore. I could write a book sharing what I had learned. So I did. It worked. Lots of people realized they could easily grow their own. Boy were the Feds pissed. It got way out of their control way fast. Grannies started growing.
It was so much fun to say – tough luck J. Edgar. The First Amendment rules.
Those were the days when FBI agents wore dirty jeans and T-Shirts and scruffy beards to the “Legalize Pot” and “Stop The War” rallies – although interestingly their black shoes were always shined, their manicures were always impeccable, and they never ever had BO.
Even so, they were dogged and clever and I made sure there were no incriminating photos of me or my friends growing the magic plant in the book; there was just one photo as I recall – an old-time Fed standing next to a 10’ Cannabis plant.
Cultivators Handbook was just a little 100 page hand-drawn, IBM Selectric Courier 12 typed out pamphlet, but between what I sold myself and all the bootleg and pirate copies worldwide I figure that little book may have helped a couple of million people gain at least a degree of freedom from legal, governmental and moralistic tyrannies. Power to the People, as we used to say. I still believe it.
I had the same thing happen when I created American Spirit and called the product “natural tobacco” – as it turned out, a whole new category. I had been growing my own organic tobacco for years. I had shared handrolls and pipes with a lot of different people who all liked it, a lot, and so I figured people who liked smoking would always choose organic tobacco if they could get it. I had been studying what the Tobacco Cartel had been doing with pesticides on tobacco since the late 1940s, and was sure that was (and is) what is killing cigarette smokers. I also knew we couldn’t even get started if we had to jump through the USDA and FDA hoops. I tried talking with them but they had never heard of anyone wanting to certify tobacco as organic, and certainly not tobacco from New Mexico, but they knew a threat when they saw one and they were not happy.
I knew I couldn’t make any claims about organic tobacco being a safer smoke than the Cartel’s DDT-drenched tobacco, which was and is solidly defended by the government, but in an “aha” moment I realized that the Feds couldn’t do anything about the fact that that the word “natural” called up certain very particular ideas and associations in people’s minds. The late 70s and early 80s were a time when “natural” was the word of the day. There was my old friend the First Amendment again – much as they want to, and try to, neither the government nor the moralists can control the meaning of words. Natural tobacco was a natural.
I knew then, even before computers, that words are the human user interface. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.
That’s why the right to use language free from oppression is sacred. God speech. Gospel.
Sooo – I started the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company. That little word is still giving the Feds apoplexy, along the anti-tobacco legions descended all the way from King James. Tough. I figure that American Spirit Organic tobacco has helped a couple of million people enjoy higher quality lives. I’m happy.
This new concept is the exact same thing, only as I said I’m almost 80 now and I know I have to hand it off to others to see it happen.
This can be either a huge business or a major social justice non-profit. Or both. Either way, it would get far too big far too fast for me to handle even if I started it myself, but it sure could make a lot of money and help a lot people if done right, and I want to be sure it gets into the right hands.
It’s likely that only the first one through the door who executes correctly with this concept will benefit. There will be hell to pay – lots of fun – and anyway, that seems to be the way the Tobacco Cartel and the world governments like it. How many new organic tobacco cigarette companies do you see, although Japan Tobacco paid $6 Billion just for the rights to the name “American Spirit” a few years ago? Organic tobacco is already a huge business even though it is kept walled off from the rest of the Cartel’s properties. That should be a clue to what people want – but how many other organic American Spirits do you see? None. By the way, you see plenty of “Naturals”, but I’ve already explained that natural means what you want it to mean. Organic only means one thing.
So there may also be only one of what I am proposing, because there will be fierce opposition as soon as the first one appears, but one operation done right will be enough, and it would have to be grandfathered (or could be taken offshore) even if the relevant laws were changed.
If you want to help, or if you’re the one or the ones to make this happen, please make the effort to convince me. I don’t know if any, or how many people are going to make a run at this, but I am only going to share the concept the one person or group who I come to believe can make this happen in the right way for the right reasons. I am also reaching out through my personal ntwork but want to open this to serendipity so here’s my announcement to any and all.
If you’re the one, or the group, or the movement to take this and make it happen, then read my books, read my blog, and figure out what would convince me. I am not selling anything. I am looking for proposals.
Don’t call or message me – email. And please don’t expect a reply unless I want to go to stage two – having you talk with several people whose judgment about people I trust completely and show them why you’re the one to work with to make this happen.
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?
In order to make the case for why organic tobacco is not only safer than pesticide-contaminated tobacco, but is very likely perfectly safe to smoke or vape especially in moderation, I want to share both hard data and published science with you, as well as some ideas for dealing with this criminal conspiracy that the Tobacco Cartel and government agencies created together and have sustained for over 70 years.
The data on pesticide contaminants in tobacco products from cigarettes to little cigars that you’ll see in this post are unique – nobody has tested cigarettes for fungicides and insecticides since the complete end to research like you’ll see in this link from a study published in the early 1970s after which all such research worldwide literally disappeared. Here’s a table from this study that shows what was being looked for and found in commercial cigarettes back then.
I hope you’ll allow me to set the stage as you read on, but if you clicked that link above and looked at the 1970s data, now check out this new hard data on what smokers are inhaling today. Not one published research study, out of the tens of thousands of “studies” funded with hundreds of millions of dollars, has compared organic tobacco cigarettes with commercial tobacco cigarettes, yet this 2018 data from research for my book “Smoke No Evil” shows clearly that smokers have been inhaling pesticides along with their tobacco smoke continuously for over 60 years since at least 1959 with complete US government knowledge and consent.
In other posts I have tracked this remarkable disappearance of research on cigarette pesticide contaminants to a global effort by the Cartel to erase the topic of pesticide residues in tobacco products from public awareness. From the early 1950s through the early 1970s there was extensive research on the topic of pesticides in tobacco products in multiple scientific/agricultural/chemical journals, every study revealing concentrations of organochlorine and then organophosphorous pesticides in every tobacco product studied, but as medical science on these xenobiotic chemicals advanced the industry understood that their most heavily contaminated products would very likely attract horrified attention and be banned if brought under proposed environmental and agricultural pesticide regulations unless they took control of any research that could lead to such regulation, and so they did. They managed to shut it all down, worldwide.
You can browse more examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research on DDT and other organochlorine pesticides in cigarettes that virtually ended in the 1970s here and here andhere and here and here. You can see from the reference sections of these journal articles that from 1950-1975 there were entire journals devoted to researching pesticide residues in cigarettes and tobacco products. Then it stopped.
During these same years the Tobacco Cartel successfully maneuvered and manipulated Congress and the agencies to get tobacco products exempted from pesticide inspection, regulation or even tracking by any government agency. To this day in 2021 no agency inspects or regulates tobacco products for pesticides, and in the regulations of every agency dealing in any way with hazardous or toxic substances, from EPA to CPSC to FDA, tobacco products are specifically exempted. It took a lot of satanic lawyering and political corruption to get every single piece of regulatory exemption in place but that’s how the Cartel rolls.
Please use your own research skills to confirm this absolutely remarkable absence of attention to what in any other product consumed by millions of people would be completely horrifying. I would love to hear of anything you find on pesticide residues in tobacco products – cigarettes, cigars, bidis – anything, anywhere. While you’re thinking about that, if you’re a smoker and are also thinking of how you can get rid of your cigarette addiction, take a look at this little handbook on how to use natural organic tobacco as a transition away from cigarette addiction.
If you or someone you care about is hooked on cigarettes, this new approach may be the answer. You’ll never hear anyone recommend that you change WHAT you smoke first if you want to QUIT smoking, but as you’ll see in this little book that’s exactly how thousands of people have already done it. And of course, what you also may find is that once you unhook from cigarettes and switch to organic tobacco, maybe blended with a little nice Cannabis flower, all those reasons you want to quit smoking may just disappear.
So, back to the story of WHY switching to organic tobacco to eliminate pesticides in your smoke is an imperative.
We know that regulators are already on the case of pesticide contamination with Cannabis, right? There’s plenty of pesticide residue research on Cannabis, and plenty of careful regulations, strictly enforced. Can’t have pesticide residues contaminating Cannabis you know, and we have to regulate everything very tightly in order to protect Cannabis users. But on (what you would think would be) a natural hot regulatory topic, toxic pesticide residues on those nasty old tobacco cigarettes that we’ve all been well-trained to hate, there’s not a peep since the mid-70s. You’ll find some limited published research, and plenty of regulations on pesticides used on field tobacco, but zero data of any kind on pesticides that remain in manufactured tobacco products, and nothing on banned pesticides coming into the US on cheap tobacco waste used in manufacturing US cigarettes and little cigars imported from places like India and Brazil. Pretty strange, you’ll have to admit. If you do find something please let me know!
It seems to me that a coordinated policy decision must have been made at a level of power and influence wielded out of public view by generational and corporate wealth shielded by the best legal minds, ensuring that there would be no more of this kind of information readily available to the public. If there is any industry research on tobacco products it is kept tight and private in the Tobacco Cartel’s so-called scientific organization CORESTA.
All funding for research on pesticides in tobacco products was simply cut off by government agencies in the 1970s, and all those government scientists were re-purposed and paid so well they didn’t complain, and this must have all been operating under coordinated control. It didn’t just happen that one day an entire area of published research with thousands of scientific publications suddenly just stopped. I haven’t been able to find a single study, funded by anyone, including the so-called non-profits that raise hundreds of millions for so-called tobacco research, and their own salaries of course, that has looked at the health impact of inhaling the supertoxic cocktail of pesticide residues in tobacco products that every Federal agency, every ‘anti-tobacco’ organization, and the entire Tobacco Cartel all know are concealed in these products.
We know that the agencies involved have played major CYA on this subject over the years, because they’ve left a clear trail of both deliberate omissions and deceptions. They’ve even occasionally had to dodge legislators like they did with Congressman Henry Waxman in 2003 with the massively deceptive GAO Report to Congress “Pesticides On Tobacco: Federal Activities To Assess Risks & Monitor Residues“. That piece of work deserves its own blog post, but the bottom line is that pesticides are no problem and the government is totally on the case – no need to worry. But interestingly enough, when it comes right down to it, here’s how EPA deals with the reality of pesticide residues in tobacco products:
“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
There’s a lot of that kind of deliberately misleading bullshit in the Federal records, but the clarity of this statement is what makes it such a great example. Hey there EPA, couldn’t the “severity of health effects linked to use of tobacco products themselves” maybe be because of the pesticides you don’t care about? This is a truly classic “la la – we don’t give a shit” and says everything that needs to be said about how carefully the Tobacco Cartel’s crimes are being shielded by EPA – and every other Federal and State agency, top to bottom.
And let’s keep in mind that FDA and a vigilante posse of clueless Attorneys General just spent tens of millions a few years ago (2015/16) to force the manufacturers of American Spirit to tell smokers prominently on the package that organic tobacco is NOT 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! That has to stop! Others are being deceived by the word “Natural” – they actually think it means safer too – 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, including all the non-organic American Spirit 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?
Everywhere you look in the Federal regulatory establishment it officially all comes down to saying “It’s the Tobacco, bitches, and just the tobacco, and we’re not going to look any further”. This from a government and anti-tobacco elite that knows perfectly well that there has never been a single study of the health impact of smoking organic tobacco cigarettes compared with smoking any of the commercial cigarettes that it knows are universally and often heavily contaminated. Not one study, not ever. They really do not want to hear about organic tobacco, or that tobacco may not be anywhere near the problem they have staked their entire careers on “fighting”. Maybe there’s nothing to fight, and maybe these folks know it and are terribly afraid people are going to find out. Why else would here be absolutely zero research on something this obviously important in 50 years?
If you press them you’ll also hear that the government actually does test tobacco and it regulates the pesticides that can be used on tobacco too. Well, those statements are both kind of true and also very misleading in a carefully crafted lawyerly kind of way. There are so many deliberately-crafted, subtle misdirections in government agency claims around pesticides and tobacco that it is, also deliberately, hard to decipher them, but the bottom line is that there is zero regulation of pesticides in tobacco products and there is zero interest in what these xenobiotic substances are doing to smokers and their children, no matter what kind of language these agencies use to try to make it seem like they are on the case. Read carefully and you’ll see the weasel language everywhere, trying to obscure the single compelling fact that no agency or regulatory organization inspects, tests or regulates pesticides in tobacco products. At all. Period. They are all quite simply complicit with the Tobacco Cartel in concealing this public health atrocity.The standard of guilt at the Nuremburg trials is that the top Nazis “by virtue of their command authority, either knew or ought to have known of the crimes committed under their jurisdiction.” Ditto.
So that’s probably why finding all that published journal research from the 50’s-70s isn’t easy. Even in Land Grant University libraries where these old ag science journals are supposed to reside, and many actually do, it’s very difficult to get access to the print copies of these old agricultural journals and the digital archives appear to have been scrubbed – although digging around pays off.
Oddly enough, considering the suppression of public tobacco product research, the Tobacco Cartel itself 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 consumer taste. They were nominally concerned that these biologically hyperactive 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 pesticides, what the Cartel scientists knew by the 1980s about what these chemicals were doing to smokers was totally concealed behind corporate walls.
There was an explosion of science and medicine in the 1980s and 90s around environmental exposure to pesticides, which everybody agreed was terrible and dangerous and had to be controlled, and which ‘nobody knew’ smokers were being exposed to daily, but there is zero published evidence that the Cartel ever tested their own products for pesticide residues – although I’ll bet that subpoenas of Cartel manufacturing records would turn up decades of detailed batch testing. There looks to be a conspiracy of silence around this whole domain of science and public health and criminality that can only be due to impeccably concealed political and economic influence and the deepest possible public agency corruption by private, concealed power and wealth.
The tests that yielded the data I showed you above were the first of their kind since the 1970’s, and were run by a uniquely qualified pesticide testing lab, a US subsidiary of a major EU company that has been doing testing on tobacco product substrate for years. Some EU governments do regulate pesticides in tobacco products but they have a deal with the Cartel to keep it quiet and so nobody even realizes that it takes place. For example, German cigarettes are simply somehow very, very light on pesticide contamination, but you never hear about it, or see any public discussions of why the German government inspects and regulates tobacco products for pesticides. It simply happens quietly, behind the scenes. That’s undoubtedly the agreement. But any American smoker who has ever gone to Germany and bought their same brand there, or any German smoker who has ever done the same in the US, will know exactly what I’m talking about even though nobody has the true facts that would so easily explain the differences.
But back to the lab tests I ran that opened all this up for me. I’m lucky to be living in Oregon, where because of Cannabis there are a number of highly qualified pesticide testing labs. I found one with impeccable credentials in testing both Cannabis in the US and Tobacco products in – guess where – Germany, their home base. Testing cigarette tobacco for pesticide residues is far more complicated than testing Cannabis, which is this lab’s main business in the US, so being able to have this lab’s scientists collect and test random samples of tobacco products against their massive tobacco substrate database with their experience in doing so was real plus.
Here’s that data again. You tell me – is smoking organic tobacco safer than inhaling any of the factory smokes you see here? The FDA wants you to think that organic tobacco is not safer. The Attorneys General of 33 states, led by California, want you to believe that organic tobacco is not safer. But neither the FDA nor any of the ‘anti-tobacco’ forces can show you actual data to support their claim, which they nevertheless enforce with the full power of their Federal authority. What do you think? Take a look. No safer?
So I hope this data on even a few brands shows the hypocrisy of the too-clever bullshit from self-serving agencies like FDA and from anti-smoking hustlers like Truth Initiativeclaiming that organic cigarettes aren’t safer than regular commercial cigarettes because all tobacco is equally hazardous. Besides being obvious bullshit that’s either a deliberate lie or gross ignorance. They either actually know nothing about the tobacco industry, although they claim to be unimpeachable experts, or else they do know about the true nature of the health consequences of even the lowest levels of exposure to these bioactive xenobiotic chemicals and they are true co-conspirators in this atrocity. I am all about documenting and showing readers the evidence that the latter is tragically true. US regulatory agencies have been corrupted to the core by the Tobacco Cartel.
Here’s another way to look at the range of contamination smokers are exposed to with non-organic tobacco products. Just absorb the image and notice the differences left to right – premium brand to cheap little cigar. It’s pretty obvious when you see the data displayed this way that as you go lower in price you go up in exposure to a huge range of bioactive chemicals any one of which has potential health & life-threatening properties if inhaled often enough regardless of how tiny the amount.
But please reflect a moment longer on this data and ask yourself – who are the markets for American Spirit Blues, Marlboro Reds, and Swisher Sweets? Who are the people smoking these brands? What are the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the smokers in these different markets? What are the poor folks inhaling vs the better-off smokers? And why are there such big differences in the amounts and kinds of pesticides and insecticides affecting these different groups of people? Those questions all have hard evidence answers, which I try to cover in my blog posts and books, but you can probably answer them yourself just by looking at these three brands. Let this slightly different display of the same data you’ve seen above speak to you. It reveals the dynamics of a hard truth behind millions of deaths. Not just these three brands – the landscape of chemical madness they reveal. Who is smoking the premium brand and who is smoking the cheap brand? What does that tell you?
After all, government at all levels and “non-profit” parasites like Truth Initiative are full partners in the revenues generated by tobacco products, and they have every reason to conceal the fact that they know that pesticides are a major, even primary and 100% preventable cause of smoking-related disease and death. The only reason pesticide residues are in tobacco products at all is because it is much more profitable and far more convenient for Tobacco Cartel companies to produce them that way than to make them cleaner and safer and organic, and the only reason that nobody has called them on this atrocity is because they have spread so much money around in so many places for so many years. If you want to identify tobacco industry co-conspirators, or maybe just pathetic dupes, just look for the ones claiming that all tobacco products are equally hazardous, organic American Spirit and Swisher Sweets alike.
If around now you’re thinking “Well, some of those pesticides look pretty bad but those concentrations look awfully low to do any damage to smokers” please understand that science now knows that many of these designer chemicals are highly bioactive in human nerves, tissues and organs even at molecular levels.
“Toxic effects of pesticide mixtures at a molecular level: their relevance to human health”
The damage even goes well beyond the smoker. If your mother smoked a brand contaminated with DDT, which as you saw earlier was almost a certainty any time from 1950 – 1972, and you are a woman, then your odds of developing breast cancer are much, much higher as a result of what DDT in those cigarettes did to your mother’s DNA. That genetic damage is passed on to both female and male children across generations.
For peer-reviewed journal research on maternal DDT and Breast Cancer see also here and here andhere. Oh, and how about Obesity? If your mother was exposed to DDT while she was carrying you, your odds of uncontrollable obesity rise dramatically. Remember, smokers from 1950-1972 were probably universally exposed to DDT, and even if they quit during pregnancy there was more than enough DDT circulating in their bodies to damage you before you were even you. Every brand in those days was contaminated not just with DDT but with Endrin, Aldrin, Lindane, Dieldrin and literally dozens of other OC and OP pesticides. Remember those links to the 1950-72 research here and here andhere and here and here?
So please tell me – are there any differences worth mentioning between those non-organic American Spirit, Marlboro and Swisher Sweets? Would tobacco cigarettes without these specific contaminants be safer than contaminated cigarettes. Prove it for yourself. Search for any one of these fungicides or insecticides listed above along with keywords like “neurological”, “fetal”, “diabetes”, “obesity”, “birth defect” or “cancer” and see what you get. As you’re looking at the results, ask yourself:
Is the least contaminated tobacco product safer than the most contaminated one, or not?
Even if you assume that the tobacco in all three brands is the same, which it isn’t, would you say there are differences in safety levels, or not?
If someone you love is smoking and you can’t get them to stop, which of the three brands above would you want them to smoke, and why?
If your kid is sneaking off and smoking, which of these brands would you least want them to be smoking, and why?
Looking at that hard data, only blind arrogance or a hidden agenda could continue to claim that the DDT, Carbendazim and Penconazole residues in the little cigars that kids are smoking right now, today, by the tens of thousands in every city in the US, doesn’t matter because tobacco itself is so bad anyway. Yet that is exactly what EPA, FDA, all the anti-smoking groups, and all the state health departments pretend to believe. That’s their excuse for doing nothing, and it’s pathetic. Here’s why.
First as I said before, there is simply zero research on the health effects of smoking uncontaminated tobacco products. No such study has ever been done. In addition, virtually all smoking and health research that used tobacco smoke obtained that smoke from “Research Standard” cigarettes supplied by the Tobacco Cartel itself, and with zero data on what pesticide residues were present in any of these “research” cigarettes. Please tell me any other area of research where the materials to be examined for their health impact are not completely characterized? No research study I have found, and I’ve looked pretty carefully, has ever acknowledged the presence of pesticide residues in the “tobacco” they were using to test the health effects of smoking tobacco.
So all statements about tobacco products begin with the unstated, unproven assumption, which is super-convenient for the Cartel, the government ‘regulators’, and the non-profit parasites, that tobacco is causing so much of the obvious harm that any damage being done by those insecticides and fungicides, that are absolutely necessary for the Tobacco Cartel to maximize profits, can safely be ignored. Not just ignored, but actively placed outside consideration or even public knowledge. In other words, concealed by conspiracy.
This level of self-serving deceitfulness while enormous numbers of people die from pesticide contaminated tobacco products every year, and while children around the world are sealing their future fates by being lured into smoking these cheap contaminated tobacco products, all of which is 100% preventable, is beyond disgusting.
The question that must be asked – if it were possible, wouldn’t the kids smoking this trash, idiots that they certainly are, be safer smoking these products if they were made from exactly the same crap as they are now, from trash and waste tobacco and cheap chemical flavorings but weren’t contaminated with those extremely hazardous pesticides we can all see in the hard data for the first time now?
We know that 1 in 13 of all the children under 17 alive today will die prematurely, painfully and expensively of “smoking-related” disease. That is a whole lot of children and future suffering. Do you think any of it could be prevented just by requiring tobacco manufacturers to remove pesticide residues from their tobacco?
They could do that, almost in a flash. Why don’t they? Because they don’t have to, and because it’s much more profitable to use chemicals than to use labor, even in the remote areas of the Third World where they grow their tobacco out of sight of regulators and inspectors.
Every tobacco product on the market could theoretically be made with responsibly grown and even organic tobacco – no problem. Give the industry 3-5 years and a drop-dead set of conditions and they will do whatever they have to do. It would take longer to actually become widely organic, but in 3-5 years the world tobacco supply could be 75% cleared of extreme and severely hazardous pesticide residues and the lives of millions of people conserved for a future with their families.
However as long as “players” like FDA and Truth Initiative and others like them play the “All Tobacco Is Equally Bad” game nothing will change. Of the total number of smokers dying each year, a significant number die because of the arrogant conceit of those who believe (or at least pretend to believe) they know all the truth there is to know about Tobacco when they have never once set foot in any tobacco field anywhere, much less a field that has just been sprayed with DDT inIndia, Nicaragua or Brazil. These countries supply hundreds of tons of contaminated tobacco waste to US manufacturers that they make into fruity little sweet smokes for our kids. US companies are also totally permitted to import tobacco products like fruity little cigars from these countries with zero inspection for DDT or any other pesticides. As long as they pay their import taxes they skate, and all that toxic load goes straight into the lungs of the young black and brown smokers in poor communities.
And then in 2015 the moralists and parasites had the nerve to go after organic tobacco. The problem is that they apparently don’t know what Tobacco is, or really that much about it, because if they did they wouldn’t have gotten themselves into the really stupid trap of insisting for the record that there’s no difference between organic tobacco and severely contaminated tobacco. They may claim when finally confronted that they don’t know about all those pesticides, but they are on the record as fully informed.
Notice that in the data tables above even the regular American Spirit Blue non-organic brand is lower in pesticides than the Marlboro or another RJR brand, Camel. That’s a big difference in safety levels even among non-organic brands, much less between organic and non-organic. However, if RJR had defended American Spirit organic tobacco on that simple evidence-based premise then they would have had to admit how contaminated all their other products are, and why. Oops! That’s a non-starter. Think of the lawsuits!
So it was a much, much better deal for RJR to let FDA pretend they scored a big win, just like years before the Surgeon General’s warnings were a godsend to tobacco manufacturers. It let them say – hey, you were warned. The so-called “Tobacco Settlement” was an even bigger fraud – look at what is actually being done with all that money. Lots of “Tobacco is really really bad” advertising, lots of huge salaries and nice perks, everybody congratulating themselves on what a great job they’re doing, and no change in the numbers of people suffering and dying, or in the number of kids heading down that dead-end road.
Until my little non-profit finally got funding and was able to begin testing tobacco products in late 2018, not one dime has ever been spent by the “anti-tobacco” forces to test for these contaminants that by themselves make these products illegal, period. But then the “Tobacco is really really bad” game would be over, wouldn’t it. Imagine the public reaction if it became clear that people in positions of responsibility and authority had known about pesticide contamination of tobacco products for many smokers’ lifetimes and had never once spoken out.
FDA knows what it has to do in return for being allowed to look like a winner in the organic tobacco derby. Their part of the deal is not to make too much noise about all those “crop protection agents”. That’s what the industry calls pesticides. After all, crops need protection, right? so much better than a nasty word ending in “cide”.
FDA and the anti-tobacco PR and advertising shills are allowed to beat the drums and make up endless variations of the “Tobacco Is So Bad” meme because that doesn’t hurt the tobacco industry one bit, but it does allow thousands of people to keep doing extremely dubious work to justify their lucrative titles and careers “fighting tobacco”.
Ever wonder why FDA is being so helpful in the industry’s pivot away from tobacco and toward e-cigarettes? Are they are all hoping that their complicity in 75 years of slaughter for profit will just slide on out of sight? Yes, complicity. FDA has had institutional knowledge of the presence of heavy concentrations of hazardous pesticides in tobacco products for over 50 years and has not once, ever brought it up in any hearings or testimony or research. That’s complicity.
I call the tobacco industry’s reckless, negligent, criminal behavior “slaughter for profit” simply because the tobacco industry doesn’t have to use pesticides at all. Traditional tobacco growers used hand labor for hundreds of years and did just fine. The tobacco companies use chemicals in place of labor strictly for increased profits and they have rigged the regulatory systems of the world so that they are protected from the consequences of their greed-driven decisions.
Should people who smoke be protected from these contaminants, or do they deserve whatever happens to them?
If these chemicals were in wine or beer, would that be OK just because alcohol is known to be so hazardous to health anyway.
Does it not matter that the most hazardous of these brands, the one with 375 times the highest background level of DDT, is the one that most kids 11-16 love?
“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 other cigarettes.” Truth Initiative 2018
That’s what every regulatory agency in the country, and in most of the world, wants you to believe – if you ever ask the question at all. So, these people are fully on record – no differences at all? Pesticide contamination of tobacco products doesn’t make smoking them more dangerous than if they were USDA Certified organic tobacco. Really? Now, hold on a minute …..
We laugh at the silly idea of Cannabis as a “killer weed” now, but millions believed it and happily allowed the government to send generations of people to prison because they believed it. It seems absurd that anyone would be fooled by that ham-handed government propaganda, but millions were and many still are.
Keeping mind that what has happened in the past could happen again, and could be happening right now, let me ask you to consider this:
What if there is a much more subtle and sophisticated generations-long campaign of disinformation about Tobacco just like there was about Cannabis? What if it’s run by a powerful industry with endless money and not by a bunch of clueless bureaucrats thinking up stupid slogans. What if the motive is a combination of profit and fear – immense profit from what they’re secretly doing, and deep fear of the liability if what they’re doing is revealed? What if the Tobacco industry has known for a long time that it has a severe, possibly fatal problem that it has managed to keep completely out of public view by spending vast sums of money on a combination of public persuasion and widespread, carefully targeted (but increasingly visible) official, scientific and medical corruption?
What if some or even most of the damage being caused in the modern world by commercial Tobacco products is not being caused by the Tobacco in those products but by previously unidentified hazardous toxic substances IN the tobacco products, and what if that means that these hazardous toxic substances in tobacco products can be controlled at the local level using existing local and state ordinances and laws? The hazardous substances in question are pesticides that are highly regulated and even banned in every other kind of product that people consume but – unbelievably – they are not regulated or inspected for in tobacco products. They are allowed by default by EPA, FDA, USDA, CDC, FTC, CPSC, and every other Federal agency. The Tobacco Cartel has controlled them all since the 1970s when all government research on pesticides in tobacco products ceased forever. You have never heard a word about pesticides in tobacco products, for all the Billions spent on “smoking and health” and “anti-smoking” and “anti-tobacco” programs and campaigns. That’s because there actually is a conspiracy, and its in plain sight – the very best place to totally conceal something.
I know that’s it’s a heresy to talk about controlling toxic substances in the tobacco products instead of the tobacco products themselves, but fair-minded people will consider the actual evidence and not rest on an unquestioned assumption: maybe it’s not the tobacco in the tobacco products that’s killing most of the people. It’s really no different that realizing that it’s better for addicts to inject drugs with clean needles and then make them available. You may not like the fact that people are smoking tobacco, but at least you can ensure that the manufacturers aren’t allowed to harm and exploit them with negligence and greed.
A Quick Review Of Some Hard Evidence
Here are a few of my posts with hard data on cigarette pesticides revealed by lab tests I commissioned in 2018 and with links to peer-reviewed research demonstrating the depth of the health hazards presented by these hidden contaminants.
After you have a chance to check out this set of links I would like to return to the topic of this post – what communities can do without “help’ from Federal bureaucrats to protect themselves from this public health threat.
This post links hard data on DDT in Swisher Sweets brand of little cigars, smokers by millions of young women, with peer-reviewed publushed research on pre-natal genetic damage to the baby
This post links hard data on hidden fungicides in tobacco brands popular in marginalized communities with peer-reviewed published research that demonstrates that exposure to these same fungicides is strongly associated with testicular cancer
This post offers hard evidence and historic documentation of the conspiratorial role of Federal agencies in concealing the health threat to smokers created by unregulated pesticide exposure
Any exposure to several of the pesticides shown to contaminate tobacco products are proven to have greater impact on babies with Latinx, African American, American Indian and Pacific Island genetics.
Could the unexplained link between smoking and suicide could be explained by the known link between pesticide exposure and suicide, once you become aware of the heavy concealed pesticide contamination in cigarettes?
A radical “quit smoking” plan that will probably offend a lot of non-smokers but that could help a lot of Diabetic smokers quit hurting themselves without having to quit.
This post examines the evidence of the link between mother’s exposure to DDT (like in Swisher Sweets) and their daughter’s lifetime risk of breast cancer. It’s huge.
The very foundation of the anti-tobacco, anti-smoking faith is that “Tobacco Is Bad Shit”. That’s the firm, unquestioning belief, and every tobacco prevention and control effort in the world is pinned to that article of faith. Tobacco causes illness and death. End of discussion. No questions. Full stop. We already know that Tobacco is bad shit, and we don’t want to hear any more about it. So let’s just move on and figure out how we can keep people from smoking and now vaping the goddamned stuff!
OK, but what if everybody is wrong? Really – what if everyone thinks things are one way, when they are actually another? Is that possible? What if people are all looking in one direction while the answer lies in another? Has there ever been that kind of mass delusion in history? Of course there has been – that’s a central theme in the history of science. People believe something fundamental for generations. It’s obviously wrong, but nobody can see it. The first one who points this out is attacked. Others speak up and say wait a minute, we should check this out and see if it’s true. They do, and it is. And then everybody says “Whocoulddaknowed?”
The oldest example of “everybody knows” is the flat earth delusion that ruled western minds for centuries. Maps showed the edges of the earth. Then one day – Oops! It’s round. Whocoulddaknowed? Then next the all-powerful church decided to burn heretics who pointed out simple, hard evidence that the world rotated rather than the heavens turning. Everyone knew that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything in God’s heavens rotated around God’s earth. Then one day – Oops! Whocoulddaknowed? It took the church centuries to apologize to Galileo. I doubt he cared. Then everyone laughed at the idea of invisible bugs causing disease because everyone knows it’s the vapors. Mal Aria. Oops! Again. Really? Whocoulddaknowed? Little invisible bugs. Well I’ll be damned.
Most of us scoff at that kind of profound ignorance as if we were invulnerable to the same folly. But I’m telling anyone who will listen – it’s not the tobacco that is sickening and killing millions. It turns.
I realize that tying those profound historical delusions to a delusion about Tobacco, even if it could be demonstrated, may seem trivial in comparison, but if anything the effect of the delusion about Tobacco has had greater impact on human life than any of those mass delusions just cited. That’s because of our profound collective delusions about tobacco, carefully cultivated by the tobacco industry to shield itself from accountability, have allowed millions of completely preventable deaths in the past and the dying will continue long into the future because of our willful collective ignorance.
The last words attributed to Jesus were “Father forgive them. They know not what they do.” I have always believed that Jesus was using those last words not to comment for all eternity on those who were killing him, and the evil Romans in general, but on the one thing most responsible for the suffering and death of mankind.
So, I’ll ask again, what if most of the damage being caused by Tobacco products is actually being caused by pesticide residues that contaminate the Tobacco products? The tobacco products, the manufactured crap, not tobacco itself. What if smoking tobacco, just tobacco, no contaminants, is OK? Gasp.
Here’s the thing. We know for sure that pesticide chemicals do exactly what they’re designed to do. They interrupt nerve transmissions, they destroy DNA, they poison internal organs, they mutate little bug babies – these chemical industry scientists, working dead-center in the traditions of the Nazi nerve gas experiments, are endlessly creative. So in the end, it really doesn’t matter whether tobacco is bad or not – we know that pesticides are “bad” for sure. They are “xenobiotics” – substances “hostile to life”. But so many people are so tied up arguing the evils of Tobacco so passionately and hatefully that they don’t see themselves as precise parallels with the Middle Ages “angels on the head of a pin” debate that consumed generations of “wise men”, while the Tobacco companies, like the wealthy classes that actually ran the Medieval Church for their own benefit, are snickering all the way to the bank.
All this may sound depressingly true and impossible to overcome, but not so. There are laws in place in every community to deal with pesticides as toxic substances, although those laws have been rigged by the pesticide manufacturers to cover what they thought was every contingency. Nothing in the Tobacco Master Settlement, or in any other shields the Cartel has erected, can protect them from liability for concealing their longstanding material knowledge of a clear, present danger to smokers and their children.
That’s the beauty of understanding that there are xenobiotic substances ON the tobacco products. It doesn’t matter what you think about tobacco itself, or even what laws and ordinances and regulations say about “tobacco” itself. Hate it or love it – doesn’t matter. These are products, and they are contaminated with known toxic and dangerous substances, and they violate all kinds of laws on that basis. If you love Tobacco, you should care. If you hate Tobacco, you should care. Pesticide-free tobacco products would be a major improvement in the life of a community regardless.
So there really doesn’t have to be any argument at all about whether or not tobacco is bad and should be controlled – some of the pesticides on the tobacco products being sold in your community are flat illegal and there are available legal remedies that the law says MUST be applied. Take that to the bank – and to your health department. and don’t let them stonewall you about “lack of authority to regulate tobacco products” – they have the authority and the duty to protect the public from pesticide exposure. They have never used it before this way, and they probably haven’t ever thought about it, but if a barrel of Cypermethrin suddenly falls from the sky into the WalMart parking lot you can bet they won’t be sitting around wondering who is going to handle it. If somebody lets loose a can of DDT in a schoolyard you can bet that the local authorities aren’t going to just call the poison hotline and then wait around. Communities can act when they are in immediate peril, and high concentrations of banned pesticide residues in tobacco products being smoked by children in the community meets that definition in spades.
Pesticides fall into a class of chemicals defined as “toxic substances” in a wide range of environmental and consumer protection regulations and statutes. In every state, there are statutes that empower local, county-level health officials to act when toxic substances threaten local public health. Yes there are pre-emption laws that forbid local communities from imposing greater restrictions on pesticides than state laws do, but in this case we’re talking about local communities using existing state laws on toxic substances in consumer products that, if detected at the any level, can trigger local action by public health authorities without waiting for permission from the state. This strategy may need tweaking in many communities, but because state and federal lawmakers have been incredibly (and perhaps in some cases deliberately) sloppy in writing tobacco product regulations I believe that tobacco product pesticide contamination opens a big wide door for local control.
In Oregon where I live, the credible allegation of the presence of banned “toxic substances” on any property located in the community is supposed to trigger mandatory regulatory responses if the allegation is properly made and supported by evidence. “Property” includes tobacco products sitting on the shelf down at the mini-mart. I’m currently working on educating our local public health administrator on her authority to act in this area.
In most jurisdictions I’ve looked at in California, Colorado, and other Cannabis-legal states, a broad range of “Property” is subject to “toxic substance” regulatory oversight by County public health authorities.
I can hear the screams from the faithful now – but, but Tobacco is so bad that it doesn’t matter if there’s poison on the leaves! I would only ask the faithful – can you point to one scientific research study that compares the smoke or vapor of 100% pure, organic Tobacco with any Tobacco product on the market? There are none. Zero. And, that’s not one of those famous “distinctions without a difference”. Please think about that – if actual, real Tobacco smoke or vapor has never been tested, and if every report of toxic substances in “tobacco” smoke has been based on rigged “reference cigarettes” supplied by the industry itself, where does that leave the idea that, without any question, Tobacco is horrible, awful, dangerous stuff? It may be true, but there are no studies that prove it one way or another.
Since 1970 virtually every “scientific” study of tobacco products has used industry-supplied “reference cigarettes” that don’t give results relevant to either what is really on the commercial market or to organic or even simply leaf tobacco. At least 25% of those “reference cigarettes” are “reconstituted tobacco”, a synthetic product made from a highly variable mix of tobacco stems, stalks and factory-floor waste called “tobacco dust”. There is no way that the results of smoke stream or vapor stream analysis using “reference cigarettes” has anything to do with tobacco in pure form. I know that anti-tobacco advocates would fear that the results of such testing might clear Tobacco’s name and give people who like to smoke and vape a license to do so. But so what?
I would say to them, if it turns out that it isn’t the Tobacco but the pesticides, since the pesticides are a very controllable harm while people smoking and vaping are not controllable, then forget about your dislike of Tobacco and deal with the problem. Or , I would also ask them, do you secretly agree with that renegade government bureaucrat in the 1920’s who arranged to have bootleg whiskey poisoned with methanol in order to scare people into not drinking? Do you think, I would ask, that this was actually a pretty good idea and those drinkers deserved what they got? Or maybe you aren’t that cold-hearted and simply think that alcohol is so bad anyway, and those drinkers were poisoning themselves anyway, so what’s the big deal?
I would ask them these questions because any person who felt so strongly about alcohol that they would ignore the deliberate poisoning of drinkers by the government wouldn’t be worried about a few pesticides in Tobacco products. By the same reasoning, Tobacco is so bad anyway – who cares about pesticides?
Think that an example from the 1920’s, a hundred years ago, is a bit irrelevant to today’s enlightened government? Well, remember Paraquat on Marijuana? The DEA came right out and said that regardless of what it did to Marijuana smokers, they were engaged in illegal activity and so it didn’t matter. Besides, from the government’s point of view, a few dead hippies weren’t worth getting worked up over. The idea that was sold to the public is clearly that Marijuana is so bad anyway who cares if the government poisons it – after all, they’re just trying to keep precious little American children from being lured into a life of degradation and crime.
Workers apply fungicide “Ditio carbamato” to cigar tobacco in Nicaragua every 4 days
So what I’m saying is that the only fair and reasonable way to determine the truth, the relative degree of actual risk, would be to compare (1) commercial tobacco products with (2) organic tobacco smoke and vapor. Otherwise all that science on smoking, and all those horrible components of “tobacco” smoke and vapor, aren’t actually testing “tobacco” smoke or vapor at all. They are testing “Tobacco product” vapor and smoke, and most Tobacco products in America have no relationship to real Tobacco leaf. Again, a distinction with a big difference.
One more heretical question, if you’re with me so far. What if those toxic substances are in Tobacco products for one reason only – because it is more profitable for Tobacco product manufacturers to use these chemicals in Tobacco production than to produce Tobacco without them? Almost as an aside, premium cigars are among the most severely contaminated Tobacco products in the world, because the growers spare no expense in applying pesticides, fungicides and every other kind of chemical to keep bugs and worms
from eating holes in those incredibly valuable cigar wrapper leaves. And why do they do that? Simple, again. It’s the money. A Tobacco leaf with bug holes can’t be used for making premium cigars, so once a bug takes a bite that leaf turns from gold into plain old shit.
Tobacco products aren’t contaminated with pesticide residues because the growers and manufacturers want to poison their customers; they’re contaminated because everybody makes more money by using these chemicals and they aren’t being forced to clean up their products, so millions of people are dying just like the bugs and worms in the Tobacco fields. It’s really that simple.
The Tobacco industry has produced organic Tobacco products, with no pesticide residue contamination. It knows how. It simply chooses not to. That cost/benefit decision alone impoverishes and drives the loss of millions of lives every year with immeasurable suffering and grief.
Pretty damned grim, right? Well, maybe not.
All it took to bring down Al Capone was one little charge of income tax evasion, and he wasn’t nearly the magnitude of monster these Tobacco companies are. Al thought he was riding pretty high too. Fancy suits. Expensive wine. Hookers. Blow. The best of everything. But he overlooked that one little crime, and that was enough.
Who in your County public health structure has the regulatory authority to order inspection of commercial products that are credibly suspected of being contaminated with the residues of banned pesticides?
Insist that they forget you are talking about Tobacco products.
Ask them what their action would be if you were coming to them with evidence that imported scented candles, or air fresheners, or incense being sold in your community were contaminated with these same pesticides at these same levels?
Geiss, O., Kotzias, D. – Determination of Ammonium, Urea and Pesticide Residues in Cigarette Tobacco. Fresenius Environmental Bulletin (FEB), No. 12 (2003), 1562– 1565
What would they do if they knew that children in the community were going to be inhaling vapors of Endosulfan, 4,4-DDE and Heptachlor over 100 times a day in homes where adults burned these candles?
How about if the issue was air fresheners contaminated with those same nerve toxins? Or maybe incense from China or India full of Chlordane?
What would they do if Tobacco products at the local mini-mart had the same contaminants as the cigarettes on the list you see here.
Oh, and about this cigarette pesticide data being from 2003? See my recent blog post with the Tobacco industry’s own data that shows these same pesticides – and about 100 more – still present on Tobacco worldwide in 2018. Show that data to your county public health department too.
If these two little bits of “income tax evasion” evidence aren’t enough to give your County public health officer “reasonable cause” to order inspection of commercial Tobacco products being sold in your County, let me know.
I’m doing some Tobacco product testing right now (12/18) in three of Oregon’s premier testing labs, and I plan to make the results available as part of a community-level Tobacco product control program.
Local communities have deferred too long to State and federal bureaucrats to protect them from Tobacco products. Simple residue testing of commercial tobacco products being sold in your community will give you ample evidence to insist that your local public health officials use their existing authority to enforce toxic substances regulations against contaminated Tobacco products for sale in your community.
If your community doesn’t have existing qualified pesticide residue testing labs, and most don’t, get in touch and ask for no-cost assistance from the Oregon Community Tobacco Control Partnership.
This is a comment that I’ve just submitted to the FDA asking them to enforce their own regulations and conduct appropriate testing, which has not been done to date, to determine whether all current IQOS applications are in compliance with regard to pesticide residues as required by this rule, and then to determine the impact of any discovered pesticide residues on the manufacturer’s many and deceptive “Modified Risk” claims.
You can support a moveon petition to Congress demanding that FDA investigate by clicking on the cute little hummingbird choking on clouds of vaporized pesticides.
(B) ADDITIONAL SPECIAL RULE.—Beginning 2 years after the date of enactment of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a tobacco product manufacturer shall not use tobacco, including foreign grown tobacco, that contains a pesticide chemical residue that is at a level greater than is specified by any tolerance applicable under Federal law to domestically grown tobacco.
FDA Comment Submission
I am concerned that
The presence of pesticide residues in the Tobacco component of IQOS has not been discussed or referenced in any of Philip Morris’s FDA multiple IQOS applications.
While the IQOS applications offer extensively documented comparisons between toxic substances in the IQOS vapor stream and toxic substances in the smoke stream of combusted Tobacco (reference Cigarettes only, not commercial cigarettes), after performing a keyword search through the submitted IQOS documentation I can find no mention of any comparison of pesticide residues in the IQOS vapor stream with those in a reference cigarette smoke stream in support of the IQOS claim of “modified risk”.
The public record does not show that FDA has yet requested that Philip Morris demonstrate compliance with Special Rule 907(a)(1)(B) with regard to any of its IQOS applications.
To grant any application related to IQOS without first establishing that IQOS can and will comply with Special Rule 907(a)(1)(B) would seriously jeopardize public health in that without demonstrated compliance and published results, the public will not have an opportunity to make a fair and complete comparison of the relative risks the pesticide residue contaminants of the IQOS product vs combustible Tobacco products.
To grant any application related to IQOS that claims “harm reduction” without first comparing the relative harm of inhaling the intact pesticide burden in the IQOS vapor stream to the harm of inhaling the partially combusted, altered and degraded pesticides in a conventional Tobacco smoke stream, would not serve the public’s interest in having full and fair disclosure of all relevant risks associated with the use of IQOS.
Discussion
Because the Tobacco materials, along with any pesticide residues, in the Tobacco component of IQOS will be vaporized well below the point of pyrolytic degradation, and none of any pesticide residues contained in the Tobacco component will be destroyed by combustion, therefore it is reasonable to project that a greater proportion of the original pesticide residue burden on the Tobacco component of IQOS will survive and retain bioactivity in the vapor stream compared with the proportion of surviving and bioactive pesticide residues in a smoke stream that would be generated by combusting that same Tobacco component; and
Because in making its case for “modified risk” Philip Morris, by comparing the toxicant properties of an IQOS vapor stream with the toxicant properties of a Reference Cigarette smoke stream, either by oversight or by design fails to address the differences in potential for harm between (1) delivery of the full original pesticide residue burden in the IQOS vapor stream compared with (2) delivery of a reduced portion of the original pesticide residue burden, of which a portion has been destroyed by combustion, and some or all of the remainder of which has been dry-distilled into altered compounds and/or partially degraded by pyrolytic processes; and,
Because Special Rule 907(a)(1)(B) requires that manufacturers “shall not use” tobacco of any origin containing pesticide residues “at a greater level” than “any tolerance” specified under Federal law; and
Because in addition to pesticides registered for use on Tobacco with established tolerance levels, Federal law also specifies certain pesticides that are banned for use on Tobacco; in the context of US Special Rule 907(a)(1)(B) this requires that manufacturers shall not use any Tobacco containing those banned pesticides “at a greater level” than zero; and
Because current Tobacco industry documentation shows that certain pesticides not registered for use on Tobacco in the United States are present in the world Tobacco supply, and certain pesticides banned in the US are also present in the world Tobacco supply (https://www.coresta.org/agrochemical-guidance-residue-levels-grls-29205.html ); and
Because Philip Morris is a large importer of Tobacco stem and waste materials from Brazil, a Tobacco exporter with documented heavy use of pesticides on Tobacco crops; (https://www.zauba.com/Buyers-of-tobacco-stems) and
Because imported Brazilian Tobacco stems and waste that are likely to be contaminated with pesticides residues, some of which may violate the “greater level” condition of Special Rule 907(a)(1)(B), are used in large quantities (millions of kilograms/year) by Philip Morris in its Tobacco product manufacturing in the US and are therefore, in the absence of any statement by the manufacturer to the contrary, likely used in its IQOS manufacturing processes; however, without testing for the presence and concentration of pesticide residues in the IQOS Tobacco component there can be no demonstration of IQOS compliance with Special Rule 907(a)(1)(B) regarding any such “imported tobacco”; and
Because Brazilian Tobacco pesticide use includes the documented use of pesticides for which US EPA and USDA have established that there are no safe levels, and that are either not registered or banned for use on Tobacco in the US ( https://www.hindawi.com/journals/omcl/2018/7017423/); therefore,
I am requesting that FDA suspend further consideration of the Philip Morris MRTP application, and any other Philip Morris application that can result in approval by the FDA for sale of IQOS in the US, until the issues I raise here are addressed under the FDA’s 907(a)(1)(B) authority and any other applicable enabling authorities.
“Dancing around the definition of smoke to avoid indoor-smoking bans is unethical. Principle 1 for implementing article 8 of the World Health Organization convention on tobacco control highlights that we should reject ideas that there is a threshold value for toxic effects from second-hand smoke. Independent studies should further evaluate the health effects of the IQOS. In the meantime, heated tobacco products such as IQOS should fall under the same indoor-smoking bans as for conventional tobacco cigarettes.” Heat Not Burn: Smoke By Any Other Name
This MoveOn.org petition urges Congress to intervene and order the FDA to suspend all IQOS applications while conducting an investigation of a previously-unrecognized public health threat represented by the IQOS system.
After you look over the simple facts revealed below, please click on the happy little hummingbird hovering in all that harmless IQOS vapor, sign the petition, and help stop this sinister fraud.
The Petition Is Simple
“We ask that Congress act with urgency to direct and enable FDA to immediately conduct testing for residues of toxic and banned pesticides on the Tobacco component of IQOS before any further consideration of any of the pending IQOS applications.
And It’s Important
The pesticides in IQOS Tobacco won’t be burned – they’ll be vaporized with full bioactivity intact. There will be much higher concentrations of these toxic substances in Tobacco vapor than in Tobacco smoke.
Teens and younger children whose neurological and reproductive development is still highly vulnerable to the xenobiotic activity of these chemicals will be inhaling a concentrated pesticide vapor, including vapors of pesticides banned for use anywhere in the world.
In its applications for IQOS Philip Morris never mentions pesticides. Accidental oversight or deliberate omission? Philip Morris is well aware of the presence of these toxic substances in the world Tobacco supply yet they appear nowhere in the list of substances being avoided by IQOS users in comparison to smokers.
(B) ADDITIONAL SPECIAL RULE.—Beginning 2 years after the date of enactment of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a tobacco product manufacturer shall not use tobacco, including foreign grown tobacco, that contains a pesticide chemical residue that is at a level greater than is specified by any tolerance applicable under Federal law to domestically grown tobacco.
Congress has to act now, before IQOS can begin vaporizing millions of American lives. And not incidentally, that’s why the 24 countries where IQOS is already vaporizing lives need to investigate and act with even more urgency than the US Congress.
This is a list of pesticide residues from an internal industry document that reveals the 100+ pesticide residues in the world Tobacco supply. That means any or all of these could be in any given Tobacco product in any country. IQOS uses Tobacco to produce its vapor. There is enough authoritative published evidence that these pesticide residues will be present in IQOS Tobacco vapor for Congress to order the FDA to investigate and if necessary act to prevent the chronic exposure of potentially millions of Americans to these 100% avoidable toxic substances.
Why avoidable? Because the industry knows how to produce organic Tobacco products. But they choose not to. That’s an purely financial decision, disregarding the health consequences, that could only be made safely if they believed that the fix was firmly in and working smoothly.
