We’ve just finished testing off-the-shelf tobacco products from local mini-marts in Portland, Oregon and among the 20+ hidden, unregulated xenobiotic contaminants that we were able to identify (see below) we found extremely high concentrations of Carbendazim. This contamination occurred in a little cigar brand that is #1 in Latino communities and high in popularity in African-American, Native American and other marginalized & low-income communities where tobacco product choices are restricted to the cheapest, and now we know the most contaminated brands.
Carbendazim has been banned in the EU since 2014. It attacks and destroys the reproductive and immune systems of young people, particularly young Latinos, African-Americans, and Native Americans whose genetic materials are known to be more vulnerable to Carbendazim than youth of European ancestry. As you can see in the data, Carbendazim is only one many previously hidden, unregulated contaminants we found, each with it’s own health impact. But for the moment let’s focus just on the Carbendazim 0.843 mg/kg that’s being inhaled 20-40-60 times a day by @ 850,000 young people in the US right now today.
Carbendazim contamination disproportionately impacts marginalized young people who fall victim to tobacco products and who, because of poverty and carefully targeted marketing, have few choices available to them other than the cheapest and most contaminated brands. Please notice the relationship between price and contamination in the data below.
Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18
As you can see, Carbendazim shows up in our first-ever data on pesticide contaminants of tobacco products (right hand column third row). This brand, Swisher Sweets, is #1 in popularity among young smokers, who are also right in the middle of their reproductive years. It is heavily marketed to youth, and is designed with sweet flavors and heavy social media advertising to be part of a cool lifestyle.
This means that these young people, in the middle of their reproductive years, are at the highest possible risk for suffering the known consequences of Carbendazim exposure. (And all the other pesticides you see there, each of which deserves it’s own discussion.) This is made more serious by the route of exposure, because inhalation exposure is far more toxic than eating or skin exposure, and the frequency, because smokers (and fetus and child) are exposed to the pesticides with every puff.
The bottom line is that 0.843 mg/kg is an extraordinary level of Carbendazim to find in any consumer product, but especially in an off-the-shelf tobacco product being marketed heavily to kids, considering that it has been totally banned in much of the world since 2014, is strictly regulated in the US, and is totally illegal on tobacco. Imagine the response of health authorities if this were found on school lunches, slurpees at the 7/11, beer at the mini-mart or granola at Whole Foods?
The problem isn’t just that the Carbendazim is present. For there to be that much Carbendazim residue, it had to have been sprayed on the tobacco deliberately, heavily and recently. There is full knowledge of the EU ban, and the reasons for it. All tobacco manufacturers have notified by their own scientific authority CORESTA. The manufacturers know, or have every reason to know, that they are committing serious race-based crimes against humanity. I can only assume that they have been at this for so long that they actually don’t realize what they are doing to so many people.
Here are just a few of the peer-reviewed research data links that throw light on this hidden relationship
“The literature review indicates that CBZ induces reproductive and developmental toxicity through alteration of many key events which are important to spermatogenesis. It seems that this fungicide may influence the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonad axis in addition to being a testicular toxicant.”
“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.”
“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).”
“Sertoli cells are the primary cellular target for a number of pharmaceutical and environmental testicular toxicants, including 2,5-hexanedione, carbendazim, and mono-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate. Exposure to these individual compounds can result in impaired Sertoli cell function and subsequent germ cell loss. The loss of testicular function is marked by histopathological changes in seminiferous tubule diameter, seminiferous epithelial sloughing, vacuolization, spermatid head retention, germ cell apoptosis, and altered microtubule assembly.”
“We found that carbendazim causes embryotoxicity, apoptosis, teratogenicity, infertility, hepatocellular dysfunction, endocrine-disrupting effects, disruption of haematological functions, mitotic spindle abnormalities, mutagenic and aneugenic effect.”
And the issue isn’t just Carbendazim as you can see looking back in the data. Most of the individual contaminants are concerning by themselves, but they are additive and synergistic in effect and their impact on human health in that regard is absolutely unknown. What is known now, and IMO it ought to be enough, is that young smokers are inhaling a toxic cocktail of chemicals each designed to operate in different ways at the nano-level to disrupt basic life processes. The dosage of the most advanced pesticides doesn’t matter – they don’t need a “critical mass” to work. A couple of molecules, well below the level of detection, is enough for them to do what they were designed to do to the reproductive systems and genetic materials of bugs, and human teens are simply unfortunate collateral damage in the tobacco industry’s search for increased profits through chemistry.
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 help them get 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 Cardi B sucking on their favorite kind of Swisher. But those Swisher Sweets aren’t anything like what the Man behind Cardi 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 bug equivalents of your precious balls are what Carbendazim is designed to attack and destroy.
But, unfortunately, those chemicals in the tobacco fields don’t only bust bug balls, they retain the chemical potency to twist and shrink the balls of every creature they touch, like human Swisher Sweet smokers. That would be you, young Dude, wouldn’t it?
Well hey, as long as you keep buying their shit why should they worry about a few chemicals you don’t seem to mind even if they are attacking your balls? Nobody says it’s illegal for them to have ball-busting chemicals in their little cigars, so why worry about it. Nobody inspects tobacco products for pesticides anyway because they think that anyone who smokes deserves anything that happens to them and this means that everyone from doctors to FDA to inspectors to anti-tobacco crusaders all totally ignore the presence of pesticides in tobacco products and what they would have to admit that means.
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
I’ll skip the long, long back story and get right to the point. If you’ve been looking for a way that individuals and small groups of people acting on their own initiative can control dangerous tobacco products at the local level, this is it. Here’s wishing you a successful 2019.
I recently had a number of off-the-shelf tobacco brands tested for pesticide residues. This was the first time this has been done in the US, in spite of the massive amounts of tax and private money spent every year on so-called “tobacco control and prevention”.
In this post I’m including hard evidence showing the concentration of illegal, totally banned DDT I found on the most popular brand of sweet & fruity little cigars, Swisher Sweets – the top choice among low-income, Black and Hispanic teens. They are also arguably the most toxic piece of shit in the whole pile of toxic shit that this rat pack of corporate criminals sells to kids. Don’t get me wrong – I found extreme pesticide contamination on many of the brands I tested – it’s just that the little cigars stood way out at the top of the contamination chart.
Don’t just take my word for the toxicity of little cigars – the University of North Carolina conducted an extensive study in 2016 comparing the toxicity of little cigar smoke, including swisher Sweets, compared with cigarette smoke. This study was also the first of its kind, just like my pesticide residue study. The North Carolina researchers found detailed hard evidence that little cigars are extremely toxic and are particularly dangerous to young, Black, and Latino smokers compared with cigarettes. (This study, combined with the hard evidence I’m sharing in this post, will blow your mind if you care about mass poisoning of innocent children.)
The one area that this North Carolina study missed was the key role that pesticide residues play in tobacco product toxicity. Like every other scientific and medical study before them, these researchers totally failed to account for pesticide contamination in the tobacco products they tested, and so they were understandably puzzled by the extreme levels of toxicity they found.
However, once you factor in pesticide contamination, the whole picture emerges clearly. The North Carolina data makes sense. It’s the differences in the pesticide burdens of different types of tobacco products that account for the differences in toxicity among types of tobacco products. That’s why it’s so important for local communities to understand the nature of this hidden threat to their children.
I found actionable levels of many different pesticide residues in all the tobacco products I just tested, including several cigarette brands popular with kids. But the overall pesticide contamination of Tobacco products, which regulators manage to ignore, isn’t the key point here. The key point for tobacco product control at the local level is that these little cigar/DDT results are not only grim news for smokers but flat out violate the law.
It is illegal to sell any product contaminated with this level of DDT anywhere in the US. and much of the world. Only soil or water-residual DDT is allowed in any food, beverage, cosmetic or other consumer product, and there is no way that the level I found could occur as a residual from soil or water – it was sprayed on the tobacco used to make this product, and it was sprayed recently. (See commentary below the data.)
The DDT concentration shown below is 700+ times the highest level found anywhere in the entire US food chain from lingering soil or water contamination, and I will guarantee that a sampling of 100 such products will yield similarly shocking results.
So here’s my suggestion. Take this data on your phone to your health department. Show them the DDT levels. Tell them that the same little cigar products are being sold at the mini-mart. (They are.)
But here’s the beauty of the hard evidence I’m offering. It doesn’t matter if your local health officials think they can regulate tobacco products specifically or not. It doesn’t matter if they think have the authority to regulate tobacco products or not. Unless they are somehow forbidden to investigate and take action in cases of toxic substance contamination in consumer products being sold to children in your county, they do have the authority to act. You may have to make them act by going to the School Board, the District Attorney, and your local media, but they do have the authority to act locally and independently on high-level DDT contamination of anything in your community – period.
These contaminated tobacco products are illegal not because they are tobacco products; they are illegal because they are consumer products contaminated with hazardous concentrations of extremely hazardous, totally banned pesticide chemicals that will be emitted when they are used as intended by the manufacturer.
If you enjoy a sweet irony, I can guarantee that when all the testing is done, most of the premium cigars that the 1% love will turn out to be the most highly contaminated of all. Although some premium cigar tobacco growers still use traditional methods, and grow tobacco without industrial chemicals, I’m quite certain that most premium cigars will prove to be far more contaminated than the cheap little cigars the busboys out behind that five-star restaurant have to smoke.
Pesticide Residue Test Sample #1 Multnomah County, Oregon Received 12/13/2018
** Relevant to risk assessment for these “Little Cigars”; the highest levels of DDT p, p- in all foods tested by FDA in their comprehensive “Total Diet Reports” for 2017, were for catfish filets and for frozen potato fries. The 2.17 ng/g potatoes and 2.3 ng/g levels expressed in the FDA “Total Diet Study” are the equivalents of 0.00217 mg/kg for potatoes and 0.0023 mg/kg for catfish. compared with 0.816 mg/kg in the single little cigar sample tested. Based on my knowledge of tobacco industry practices, additional testing will show serious levels of OCP and other classes of pesticide contamination particularly on tobacco products in the “discount” and low-price market segments and, as we will see, in the premium cigar market segment as well.
I know for certain that as we test other tobacco products, especially the cheap ones, we’ll find stuff that makes DDT look like a hint of mint. However, this data is right now, and approximately 800,000 children between 11-15 are smoking this particular brand of little cigar every day and inhaling every one of the pesticides listed.
But even if the only contaminant were the 0.816 mg/kg (or 816 mcg/kg) DDT ….
“Average adult intakes of DDT were estimated to be 62 µg/person/day (1000 micrograms = 1 milligram) in 1965 and 240 µg/person/day in 1970, before the DDT ban was instituted. The FDA Total Diet Studies show that the daily intakes have fallen since the ban, with daily intakes (for a 16-year-old, 70 kg male) averaging 6.51, 2.38, 1.49, and 0.97 µg/person/day for 1978–1979, 1979–1980, 1984–1986, and 1986–1991, respectively.” https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/chem_background/exsumpdf/ddt_508.pdf
“Based on all of the evidence available, the Department of Health and Human Services has determined that DDT is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. Similarly, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has determined that DDT is possibly carcinogenic to humans. EPA has determined that DDT, DDE, and DDD are probable human carcinogens.”
It was at least partly from the hidden and unaccounted-for pesticides, which were overlooked in this study as they have been overlooked in virtually every American scientific and medical study of “tobacco” smoke. Little cigars are far more contaminated with far more toxic “crop protection agents” than cigarettes because of differences in how the tobacco is raised, and in how much highly contaminated tobacco manufacturing waste is used in making the product.
