They were doing asbestos they could.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Was activated carbon not invented yet, or too expensive?
Asbestos was a miracle substance, like radium; you put it in everything. Talking about activated carbon on the label isn't going to help sell cigarettes the way talking about asbestos does
We
Fucking
Loved
That
Shit
My favorite podcast, Stuff You Should Know, just did an episode on the invention and history of cigarettes, though they didn't mention this little innovation.
Did they mention the fact that filters include chemicals to make them turn brown in the presence of nicotine smoke? The idea is to create the impression that they're actually capturing lots of noxious goo, when in reality they do virtually nothing as far as negative health effects are concerned.
Yes, they did. This is taken from the transcript of that episode, about 8 minutes in:
Chuck: They changed the pH on that filter to purposefully turn it brown as you smoke, so you look and you see, man, look at all that brown stuff that's not getting into my lungs.
Josh: It fooled me for twenty years. Up until a couple of days ago, I had no idea that that was the case.
Chuck: Yeah, just one of the dirty tricks that cigarette manufacturers used and still used.
They also point out how the filter "is doing something" to reduce what makes it into your body, but not much.
As far as I understand, there is absolutely no clinical evidence that suggests filters do anything as far as reducing the risks of cancer and other smoking-related diseases is concerned. In fact it's suggested that it has the opposite effect since it tends to make people smoke more.
The Cigarette Century is an excellent recent book that also talks about these issues.
What in the conspiracy theory?!
Take a drag. Blow the smoke through a tissue. Report back.
Tell me how your lungs felt smoking filterless vs. filtered. Or shall I start?
The claim isn’t that they stop nothing, it’s that they prevent none of the cancer causing stuff.
You’re not actually preventing any health issues, but you sure feel better about having another drag.
Yeah. I don't get this claim they do next to nothing.
I smoked for years. Filtered, non filtered, and later "lights". The only difference with filtered and lights is a row or two of holes punched in the filter so you pull in more air.
The difference of smoking a filter vs a non filter though is night and day.
Kent executives patting themselves on the back for making nicotine no longer the worst thing in a cigarette.
I am once again reminding the world that the ancient Romans warned not to buy slaves from asbestos mines because of the health issues they had.
We have known for a very long time that asbestos was bad and we keep using it to this day.
At least we aren't using it to make easy clean tablecloths and napkins that only need to be thrown in a fire to clean...
asbestos mines
TIL asbestos is a naturally-occurring substance (I always thought it was synthetic!)
And it's been used pretty much forever... in pottery, in garments... Charlemagne had an asbestos shirt he'd throw in the fire to clean stains off in order to amaze his visitors.
Forbidden floof
Yeah, it's a crystal structure and it's really a shame that it causes so many health issues because it's kind of an amazing material otherwise. It's lightweight and strong enough to make bricks with but you can also make flexible fabric out of it, and it can hold up to really impressive amounts of heat. As the poster above said, it is still in use in some industrial applications because in some situations there is no effective alternative.
Of course the problem is that if you damage an asbestos brick or bend an asbestos fabric you get lots of tiny little asbestos fibers that come loose. My understanding is that the fibers are so small that they pierce cell walls and damage DNA strands, hence the cancer.
They're not small enough to directly damage DNA, they get trapped in your tissues and are impossible for your body to remove, and they cause inflammation and scarring. The long term inflammation and scarring is what increases cancer susceptibility
Here we go, found it in the Health Impacts article:
There is experimental evidence that very slim fibers (<60 nm, <0.06 μm in breadth) tangle destructively with chromosomes (being of comparable size). This is likely to cause the sort of mitosis disruption expected in cancer.
And here in MECHANISMS OF ASBESTOS-INDUCED CARCINOGENESIS
It is somewhat more difficult to understand the “chromosome tangling hypothesis.” We recently found that asbestos fibers including crocidolite are actively taken up by several different kinds of cultured cells. Furthermore, those fibers enter both the cytoplasm and the nucleus. In this situation, asbestos fibers may tangle with chromosomes when cells divide. Whether there is a specificity of tangling for any chromosomal region is the next question to be addressed.
So not quite down to the DNA level, but basically chromosomes can get wrapped around asbestos fibers during cell division.
Oh so like microplastics. Great :/
And asbestos is just one form of silica. Silica dust from many sources can cause serious lung problems, e.g. breathing in the dust from cutting granite countertops (which contain silica as quartz) or volcanic dust.
Heck just concrete dust will accumulate and cause chronic health issues. Something I hate knowing when I drive by a construction site and see a bunch of guys cutting foundations with saws, huge plumes of concrete dust, they're just breathing it unfiltered. But no one is playing up the health risks to these folks, and they aren't thinking about how bad it will be at 60 to be on oxygen or dead.
Wood dust also does this. In fact, any little soluble, hard particles of a certain shape and size can get stuck in your lungs and do damage there. They act in a biophysical and not in a biochemical way. Which is why, in several countries, you're required to wear PPE when handling such, or any, powders or dusts.
Yeah this sucked getting back into woodworking, they basically tell you now, if you can smell the sawdust and wood (my favorite part), you're in danger so get a mask on.
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It had blue asbestos, which is the form most likely to cause mesothelioma. It “protected” smokers by killing them before heart attacks, strokes, or emphysema could. Mission accomplished.
The real surprise is that it didn't become the norm, and still legal as long as it has a little warning on the pack, while in the meantime useful medical drugs are banned as "potentially risky"
Where do you live?
All black countries on this map have banned all use of asbestos.
There is still an issue, at least here in the UK, of asbestos in older buildings.
Many of our infrastructures are rather old, and unless they are individually done to remove the asbestos (at a heavy price point), many buildings still contain it.
Just a couple of years ago I had to change a light fixture, and get someone trained to handle the substance (since it is still in the ceiling between floors).
Of course it is still in use, but no new products containing asbestos are being produced or allowed to be sold. You still see e.g. Eternit roofing in Germany as well.
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Useful medical drugs need to prove they are effective before being used. That's not a bad thing. Smoking is a remnant of historical habits before it's dangers were known. The crime is more that we allow it to be used and marketed to new customers. New Zealand has the right idea by increasing the legal age annually but that got shot down.
Allowing drugs to be used without proof would likely lead to more things like smoking causing harm, not less.
I often think about what the 2025 equivalent of this is. What are we doing today that we think is helping, but is actually taking us out?
Social media.
"Oh my god, grandpa! You were just on that all day?! And you let kids use it??! Didn't you know it was bad for you?!"
"Y... Yeah. We kinda knew."
"Our grandparents lied to themselves about the harm of smoking as they called cigarettes 'coffin nails', we spent all day on social media telling ourselves it's fine and that its how we keep in touch as we saw our cousins and childhood friends lose their damn minds."
But for real I think the fact that it became difficult to live a social life without social media around the time the dangers became difficult to deny is very reminiscent of what it must have been like for my parents and grandparents as non-smokers in the mid-late 20th century.
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