Does your kid, or a kid who you know and care about smoke little cigars or some other kind of cheap, flavored tobacco? Are you frustrated because you can’t stop them? Do they have a major “don’t give a shit” attitude? Even if they are being little idiots, do you understand and still want to help?
I propose some evidence-based reality and an appeal to that little idiot’s well-concealed intelligence. Do you think you can you get this kid to sit with you for one hour and read this post together. In the post I will lay out hard evidence showing how their testicles and genetic materials (and those of their friends) are under stealth chemical attack from contaminated cheap products they are being suckered into smoking. Challenge yourselves to understand the science and read through the references together – they are linked to the original research. This isn’t obscure science – this is about clear evidence of specific chemicals known to attack male reproductive organs in the tobacco brand they smoke that are there because of a cheap, money-grubbing manufacturer’s carelessness and greed. See if your discussion doesn’t trigger an instinct for self-preservation in them and maybe even a clue.
We all know that “please please don’t smoke” doesn’t work, and neither does “smoking is really really bad for you”. How many millions of dollars are still being wasted on endless repetition of some version of those two “nanny state” themes? Tell a kid that there are 4000 really really bad chemicals in that cigarette, or that he’s going to get lung cancer, and he will sneer to show you how tough he is. Tell him that the cheap-ass manufacturer of that crap he’s smoking is using trash tobacco that’s such shitty stuff that it’s contaminated with totally illegal chemicals that are attacking his balls every time he takes a hit. Tell him that the brands that are poisoned this way are pushed hard to people in poor neighborhoods who can only afford cheap poisoned shit, and to people who have enough money to afford less poisoned brands but are too stupid to know the difference. Show him the data tables below and ask him what he thinks – which brands are pushed to which people in which neighborhoods? Point out, in case he doesn’t get it, that when it comes to tobacco shit definitely rolls downhill.
BTW this post is for boys. I’m working on one for girls that will be titled “Girl – Those Swisher Things Are Frying Your Eggs!”
So young Dude, you smoke Swisher Sweets. Maybe some other brands too. Lots of people love to smoke Swisher Sweets, especially when they see hotties like Carly B sucking on their favorite kind of Swisher. But those Swisher Sweets aren’t anything like what the Man behind Carly B. wants you to think they are. No indeed.
Dude, no joke – your balls are at serious risk smoking that shit. If you’re cool with that, no problem. It’s your life. But, for the sake of those who care about you, take a little time and think about a couple of things.
Let’s begin with a reality check on those sweet fruity little cigars. Do you think you’re going to get real tobacco at 2 sticks that weigh 3 grams each for $0.99? Really? Then you must have bought your share of baggies of Oregano thinking you were getting bargain dope, because the math doesn’t work. Even if they didn’t shrivel your nuts, little cigars are not real tobacco. They are worse trash than any toxic Mexican weed you ever smoked, even when you weren’t buying Oregano, and here’s why. Those little 3 gram sticks are made especially for poor kids and stupid kids and are loaded with chemicals that do all kinds of nasty shit, but only to the people who smoke the cheap stuff. Most of those chemicals aren’t even there in the pricier brands, and Swisher Sweet smokers and little cigar smokers in general get special treatment as you can see here. This data is from tests we just ran on off-the-shelf tobacco products popular with young smokers from all kinds of communities.
Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18
Keep your eye on that Carbendazim under “Swisher Sweets” in the right-hand column because that’s the ball-shrinker we’re talking about. I’m going to explain the connection in a minute.
To be fair you have to ask why those friendly folks at Swisher Sweet would want to bother to shrink your balls? Well, they don’t actually. They don’t care about your balls, or the kids you may want to make someday with those balls. All they’re doing is spraying their tobacco fields with chemicals that kill off the bugs more effectively by shrinking adult bug balls so they can’t have baby bugs. It’s a new way of controlling bugs, and they will tell you they have to do it. You just can’t kill bugs with pure poisons anymore – they’ve gotten resistant. But their little balls are vulnerable as hell, and that’s what these chemicals are designed to attack and destroy, so you add chemicals like Carbendazim to your chemical cocktail and wham – no bugs, and a lot more valuable tobacco per acre.
OK, bugs don’t have balls, not little ones hanging on the outside anyway, but they do have male reproductive organs and those are what Carbendazim targets.
But, unfortunately, those chemicals the manufacturers use in their tobacco fields don’t only bust bug balls, they twist and shrink the balls of every critter they touch, like human Swisher Sweet smokers. That would be you, young Dude, wouldn’t it? Well hey, as long as you keep buying that shit and smoking it what do they care about you and your precious little balls? Nobody says it’s illegal for them to have ball-busting chemicals in their little cigars so why worry about it – they keep the bugs from eating all those valuable tobacco leaves that the companies sell in premium brands while poor folks and kids stupid enough to think they’re getting a sweet deal get to smoke the trash the bugs leave behind.
OK, this has all been trash talk. Now I’m going to assume that you understand regular English and basic science. I’m also going to assume that if you’ve read this far maybe you’re ready for some straight talk, and that you may, secretly even, be starting to give a shit. So here’s just a taste of the straight science behind your shrinking balls in regular English, with links for you to follow and make up your own mind what you’re going to do about it.
This first reference just about says it all for any young man who smokes little cigars and expects to have children:
Then there are all these peer-reviewed scientific findings:
“Although the exact mechanism of action is unclear, carbendazim appears to bind to an unspecified site on tubulin and suppresses microtubule assembly dynamic. This results in cell cycle arrest at the G2/M phase and an induction of apoptosis.” (translation: it shrinks your balls.)
“Administration of carbendazim induced significant decrease in testis weight, diameter, and germinal epithelial height of the seminiferous tubules. Histological results revealed degeneration of seminiferous tubules, loss of spermatogenic cells, and apoptosis.
Moreover, carbendazim caused elevation of testicular malondialdehyde (MDA), marker of lipid peroxidation, and reduced the activity of the antioxidant enzymes, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT).” (translation: it shrinks them and totally fucks them up.)
“2,5-Hexanedione (2,5-HD), a taxol-like promoter of microtubule assembly, and carbendazim (CBZ), a colchicine-like inhibitor of microtubule assembly, are two environmental testicular toxicants that target and disrupt microtubule function in Sertoli cells.” (translation: testicle toxins work together.)
“Due to synergistic effects, low environmentally present concentrations of imazalil and cypermethrin in food, and especially their mixtures with carbendazim have genotoxic potential that could be particularly dangerous over prolonged exposure in mammalian organism.”(translation: prolonged exposure destroys the genetic materials in your balls.)
If you want to read more on other linkages between pesticide contamination of tobacco products and disease please follow these links to other recent posts:
Obesity & Obesogens: The Toxic Chemical Connection
We’ve shown through lab analysis that there are high concentrations of DDT and other endocrine-disrupting pesticides present in tobacco products. These pesticides are proven to cause severe developmental and cognitive deficiencies. Since many dropout teen smokers were also born to smoking mothers, we have to ask if there could be a birth to death connection between tobacco product pesticide contamination and lifelong failure for some, or even many of the 1.2 million children who drop out every year? Are these the “replacement smokers” the industry talks about?
What if DDT-contaminated tobacco products, and perhaps especially little cigars like Swisher Sweets, are directly responsible for at least some of America’s high school dropouts? Could the extreme levels of DDT and other endocrine-disruptors recently (2018) detected in little cigars be contributing to the unusually high rates of ADHD and poor cognitive performance metrics among high school dropouts who smoke them?
Our research strongly suggests that many dropouts may actually be victims of the tobacco product choices that they are being driven to make by poverty, social class, race, and by terribly wrong-headed public policy. Anyone who truly understands the tobacco industry knows that the cheaper the tobacco product, the more contaminated with pesticide residues.
Could high school dropout rates be reduced simply by restricting or banning community-wide sales of tobacco products that are proven to be contaminated with illegal pesticides that are known to present extreme hazards to critical human developmental processes that affect learning and cognition?
We know that 1.2 million children dropped out of High School in the US in 2016.
We know that poor non-white children are disproportionately represented in the dropout population and suffer the lifelong consequences disproportionately.
We know that poor non-white children who are regular smokers disproportionately smoke “little cigars” and that economics is a major factor in this behavior.
We know that “little cigars” are disproportionately marketed by the manufacturers to poor, non-white and young neighborhoods and communities that, coincidentally or not, have the highest dropout rates.
Our recent lab results show that Swisher Sweets, the most popular brand by far among child smokers 11-17, has extremely hazardous levels of DDT and other endocrine-disrupting pesticides. We are certain that these contamination levels will prove to be representative of little cigars as a product category.
Endocrine-disrupting pesticides are known to present multiple severe hazards to human fetal and child development including high risk of cognitive deficit disorders.
While many of the pesticides identified in Swisher Sweets are unregulated and have very little human toxicological history, DDT has an unequivocal status as an “extreme hazard” to humans and in itself may be sufficient to account for an undetermined portion of observed ADHD and cognitive deficits among child smokers.
We know that DDT specifically crosses the placental barrier and that this puts the unborn children of pregnant teens who smoke little cigars at severe risk of life-long DDT-related developmental learning disabilities.
We know that 27% of girls who drop out are pregnant.
We know that inhaled DDT is incrementally more toxic than dietary DDT.
We know that poor human diet/nutrition exacerbates the impact of DDT
So, girls who smoke DDT-contaminated little cigars, who are pregnant, who have poor diets, and who drop out of school are themselves severely compromised by the impact of pesticides and are also at heightened risk of giving birth to a baby who is developmentally compromised due to DDT exposure in utero.
We talk about the cycle of poverty. Could tobacco product pesticide poisoning be a 100% preventable driver of a major part of that cycle, failure at school?
Multiple studies show that children who initiate smoking with little cigars are predominantly from low-income families and choose contaminated little cigars over less contaminated cigarettes because of price, convenience and marketing. In other words, their decisions are price-sensitive but otherwise mindless.
We know that a primary tobacco prevention and control strategy is to raise taxes on the theory (that they are scrambling to prove) that higher prices discourage starting and promote quitting. The claim is that this strategy reduces overall harm from smoking. This is demonstrably counter-factual when actual price-sensitive behavior is accounted for, which consists of simply switching to or starting with cheaper brands with greater pesticide contamination. Therefore greater not less harm is done especially to young smokers by increasing taxes as a control and prevention strategy.
We must ask public health authorities and legislators whether tax-based tobacco control and prevention strategies are unintentionally reinforcing dropout rates by driving young smokers to cheaper, more contaminated brands of tobacco products?
“We conclude that prenatal DDT levels may be associated with delayed Processing Speed in children at age 7 years and the relationship between prenatal DDE levels and children’s cognitive development may be modified by sex, with girls being more adversely affected.”
“A critical window of exposure to DDE in utero may be the first trimester of the pregnancy, and psychomotor development is a target of this compound. Residues of DDT metabolites may present a risk of developmental delay for years after termination of DDT use.”
“Prenatal exposure to DDT, and to a lesser extent DDE, was associated with neurodevelopmental delays during early childhood, although breastfeeding was found to be beneficial even among women with high levels of exposure. Countries considering the use of DDT should weigh its benefit in eradicating malaria against the negative associations found in this first report on DDT and human neurodevelopment.”
“The authors found higher risk for ADHD-like behaviors assessed with the CRS-T at higher levels of PCBs and p,p’-DDE. These results support an association between low-level prenatal organochlorine exposure and ADHD-like behaviors in childhood.”
“Children with higher urinary DMP concentrations may have a twofold to threefold increased risk of being diagnosed with ADHD. We report a dose-response relationship between child DMP levels and ADHD. Organophosphate pesticide exposure may have deleterious effects on children’s neurodevelopment, particularly the development of ADHD.”
“Results found an association between increasing pyrethroid pesticide exposure and ADHD which may be stronger for hyperactive-impulsive symptoms compared to inattention and in boys compared to girls.”
“The results indicate that both pesticides may induce altered levels of neuroproteins, important for normal brain development, and neurobehavioral abnormalities manifested as altered adult spontaneous behavior and ability to habituate to a novel home environment. The neurotoxic behavioral effects were also present several months after the initial testing, indicating long-lasting or even persistent irreversible effects.”
“Epidemiologic data reveal that children aged 6-15 with detectable levels of pyrethroid metabolites in their urine were more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.”
“Results support an association of prenatal OP exposure with deficits in social functioning among blacks and among boys, although this may be in part reflective of differences in exposure patterns.”
“Among the findings associated with increased pesticide levels are poorer mental development by using the Bayley index and increased scores on measures assessing pervasive developmental disorder, inattention, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Related animal toxicology studies provide supportive biological plausibility for these findings.
Additional data suggest that there may also be an association between parental pesticide use and adverse birth outcomes including physical birth defects, low birth weight, and fetal death, although the data are less robust than for cancer and neurodevelopmental effects.
Children’s exposures to pesticides should be limited as much as possible.”
