12 ms·

Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet

296 points by hammock 3y ago

sneak 3y ago
Reminder: cigarettes kill 7x as many people in the US every hour, day, week, and month as the "opiate epidemic" in the USA. One is an "epidemic" and "public health crisis" and access is locked behind a prescription. One is available to anyone 18 or older on each streetcorner.
- hammock 3y ago
  21*
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- mcmoor 3y ago
  I knew that my country really won't be prepared with anymore relaxation on narcotics because we smoke cigarettes much more than almost every other country in the world despite long long campaign on health issues. Heck, Big Tobacco manages to capture religious sector! That's how powerful legalized capitalized drugs are.
  - yadaeno 3y ago
    Why do people on this forum always say “my country”. Why not just say the name of the country? This information is not useful to anyone without that context.
    - sunnybeetroot 3y ago
      It’s also poor personal infosec if they mention “my country” and include the country name as it reveals a part of their location.
      - patmcc 3y ago
        Most of us aren't all that concerned about country-level doxing.
- simmerup 3y ago
  So we should give all the cigarette smokers opiates right? Reduce the mortality rate drastically that way.
- angelgonzales 3y ago
  That may be true but the people who broke into my car twice didn’t do it because they were addicted to nicotine - they did it because they were addicted to opiates.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    Hmm. But is that the difference between opiate and nicotine addiction? Or the difference between the restrictions we placed on them? In other words if we would treat tobaco the way we treat the hard drugs, would people addicted to it perform crimes to get their fix on the surely much more expensive black market? I truly don’t know the answer.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    No, they did it because the government supports the prices of opiates, which could easily be made for a nickel a dose. There's nothing intrinsic about opiates that gives you an unquenchable appetite for money. That's cocaine.
- rcme 3y ago
  What’s the average age of death though?
- serf 3y ago
  i'm not interested in defending tobacco/cigarettes, but comparisons like this beg the question : do you see a difference between an addiction that leads to eventual chronic health issues/injury/death sometimes many many decades after first-onset versus an addiction that will many times kill even first-time users, and rarely allows for habits that last many decades? if you want to compare the health crises, then divide the results by time to create an 'impact' score. That's why we're focusing on opiates collectively.
- version_five 3y ago
  This is a pretty poor equivalence, I don't think I need to detail all the reasons, suffice to say a life shortened by smoking is not the same as one destroyed by opiates, either in years lost or in quality of life. Smoking is a poor long term health choice and should be discouraged, it's nothing like what's happening with opiates.
- nvllsvm 3y ago
  What are the age ranges of people dying from cigarettes vs. opiate abuse?
- patmcc 3y ago
  Smoking cuts your life expectancy by something like ~10 years. Most of those smoking deaths are people who've already smoked 30+ years; there's not a lot we can do to prevent those deaths now, even if they all stopped smoking tomorrow. They'd still get cancer and everything else at higher rates. We've also done a pretty good job at lower smoking rates, especially among young people. Sure, we can ban or restrict tobacco more (maybe we should) but the "public health crisis" is mostly done. Opiate addiction cuts life expectancy by ~35 years. And getting them onto safer drugs would save lives very immediately. There's stuff that could be done, and everyone knows it, and it's not happening. That's the public health crisis. edit: and, yes, also, opiates are also more socially destructive, due largely to the criminality.
  - martinald 3y ago
    This isn't really true. Most of the death from smoking comes from other lung & heart problems, not cancer. As such even if you smoke for many decades and quit your risk decreases dramatically pretty quickly, even within days.
    - patmcc 3y ago
      Quite an interesting chart near the bottom of this page - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/quit_smoking/how_to_quit/benefits/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/quit_smoking/how_to_quit/benefit... - doesn't quantify everything, unfortunately, but yeah even after a year the "risk of heart attack drops sharply". Interesting.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      And even cancer is getting more treatable these days. Lung cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence (although it often does still kill.)
- martinald 3y ago
  While I'm not suggesting tobacco is fine or anything; they really aren't comparable. Opiate addiction is going to completely take any quality of life away from you (tbh regardless of legality, people that were on prescription opiates still had horrendous disability and mental illness caused by the constant abuse of them, though obviously having to spend hundreds of dollars a day on an illegal supply adds a whole new dimension of horror). Most people who smoke tobacco don't experience any significant quality of life issues until many decades in when the COPD and serious illness starts. Obviously horrible - but I would say you'd lose more than 7x more quality of life (disability adjusted years?) being an opiate addict over being a smoker.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Smokers are functional. Junkies... well, they're junkies. One is a useful member of society, the other is a liability at the best of times. And smokers die old. Quickly too... don't linger on with chronic disease like other old people. Helps keep Medicare solvent.
- gerdesj 3y ago
  Ex-tabber here, 5.5 years clean, with some remaining ... issues. It is bloody hard to give up, really hard but not impossible. If you want to give up then I do recommend that you prepare yourself mentally. I ended up coming up with a couple of "downside mantras" that I would repeat to myself, whenever thoughts of smoking happened. I initially thought I would use a vape but realized very quickly that would not work for me. If nicotine is the (only) addictive substance then patches, gum, vapes etc would just work. The habit thing is relatively easy to crack but there must be other addictive components to smoking, including sensation (you need to be a smoker to understand that one). Also I didn't want to substitute one thing for another, so abstention was the way to go for me. Some may find help with gum and patches - gum is probably the best substitute, being "active" (and might even improve mouth hygiene). I stopped mid afternoon on a Friday and had a lie in on Saturday. That got me to around 18 hours. I made it to 24 hours. Then I managed two days, then four, then a week (a landmark one day less than the next double - every little helps). Then two weeks. Visited the kids and bummed a drag on a fag and hated it. At around a week my sense of taste and smell re-arrived with a major jolt! I can remember smelling people entering the room and other mad things. It calmed down to normal about week three and I now have a sense of smell that accords with other non smokers. In the end, if you want to give up, then get cracking sooner rather than later and develop strategies but do not try to rely on things like vapes and gum to do it for you. You have to quite literally give yourself a massive mental kicking too. For me I focused on two aspects I hated about smoking and I would mentally repeat this to myself whenever I thought of it: "I don't want to smell and I don't want to die" Even with my denuded sense of smell I could tell I reeked and the second one is pretty obvious. When I did that the craving or thought would be quashed for a while. I did have dreams where I smoked and sometimes woke up convinced I had been smoking. You do have to wrestle with yourself somewhat and decide to win! I continued: ... then a month. Now I have saved £10.50 x 30 = £309 (I thought I smoked 20 a day but I smoked more - self delusion, probably more like 25-30). Cool. ... two months, four months (quarter of a year). Six months. Now I have realistically saved around £2000, have a functional sense of taste and smell and I no longer cough all the time. ... one year. Fuck me, how the hell did I manage that? ... pandemic etc ... 29 July 2023 - rarely think about smoking until an article on HD hoves into view.
csours 3y ago
If you're wondering why this isn't a big deal in food - tobacco leaves have a huge surface area and generally are NOT washed before being dried. Nearly all food IS washed; but this is a good reminder that we live on a real planet, not a model ecosystem, you're eating trace amounts of all kinds of stuff.
- hammock 3y ago
  The sticky stuff on the tobacco leaves (where most of the Po210 is) is important to the product. Also worth clarifying that the tobacco plant is radiophilic, meaning it proactively takes up radioactive elements into the body of the plant and tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity. It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    > It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers Wooow. All these years and I'm still learning new things about how criminally insane those greedy fucks are. Two in a day today. Sure would be cool if any of our well funded institutions did something about it.
  - progman32 3y ago
    > tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity. Can you post a source for this? Curious.
    - sidewndr46 3y ago
      It's complex, but the fertilizer itself is actually the source of the radioactive stuff. Tobacco has the odd characteristic of capturing that and the decay products are things like polonium https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/08/29/radioactive-polonium-in-cigarette-smoke/ https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/08/29/radioactive-pol...
      - yaakov34 3y ago
mentos 3y ago
Kind of like how social media companies know their products are detrimental to the youth that consume them?
- veec_cas_tant 3y ago
  Maybe I'm way off, but in my mind social media is more like ice cream or fast food companies knowing their product is unhealthy.
  - gtvwill 3y ago
    Your way off. Haven't seen ice cream and fast food be responsible for anywhere near as much suicide and detrimental mental health as social media. Folks generally use ice cream to bring you out of that mood not drive it home.
  - version_five 3y ago
    I think social media is worse for society than tobacco. Tobacco shortens peoples lives, social media is destroying society. We'd ultimately be better living harmoniously but only until seventy than in civil war and mass upheaval.
    - casey2 3y ago
      Number of civil wars and mass upheaval in the US post social media: 0 Number of civil wars and mass upheaval in the US pre- social media: 1 I'll take social media and quit cigarettes.
      - gtvwill 3y ago
        Lol if you take the number of annual gun deaths in the US each year, you arguably are still in a civil war. 40000+ of your own killed each year just from guns alone. You kill more of yourselves each year than was lost in the entire gulf War of 1990 to 91.
        3y ago
tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
Should have landmark consequences but cashed up lobbies run the show.
User23 3y ago
For what it’s worth this information was publicly available on the Internet in the mid ‘90s if not earlier.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  ... Can you prove that? I'd be interested in a link.
gtvwill 3y ago
What's that you say? We need retrospective criminal charges for this. Hell yes we do! Drag those company boards out of retirement and slap em in jail and size their assets. Unlikely to happen but I can dream.
iTradeWarez 3y ago
Unsurprising and there will be no significant consequences.
stormcode 3y ago
It's a little surprising to me that no company has come out with a 'healthier cigarette'. They could claim to do the acid washing and all the things mentioned in the article in their advertising. Probably without actually saying their cigarettes are healthier but instead focusing on what other companies don't do (the acid wash) and the cancer causing carcinogens their competition's cigarettes contain that their own do not. That would hook people who enjoy smoking but also enjoy not dying. Even if they are just deluding themselves. It would at least get me (former smoker) curious. I've also always wondered if Big Tobbaco was working to cure cancer. It would make business sense. If we cured the types of cancer that smoking causes... A lot more people would probably smoke. (Obviously there are other issues like emphasima).
- version_five 3y ago
  I think there's lots of regulatory and liability reasons why it's not feasible. Like they're grandfathered in to selling what they do, and nobody wants to entertain ideas of a safer thing, only prohibition. Look at what happened with Juul. Maybe it's changed now, but they had a safer alternative and got shut down. Also as a bit of trivia, iirc from the book "Barbarians at the gate", RJ Reynolds in the 80s was working on a safer cigarette under Ross Johnson that heated the tobacco instead of burning it. Once they got LBO'd and saddled up with debt, that got canned.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    > Look at what happened with Juul. Maybe it's changed now, but they had a safer alternative and got shut down. 1. They got in trouble for marketing to teenagers, not for making health claims. 2. They are a going concern, they haven't been shut down. At least not yet. > On June 23, 2022, the FDA denied authorization for Juul to continue selling its products in the United States, and issued Marketing Denial Orders banning any further marketing or sale of the products effective immediately. That order was blocked by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. the next day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juul Regardless, they are only one brand, there are many companies with nearly identical products. 3. I'm not an expert but from what I've read, it seems like the there's evidence they may be safer than smoking, but it seems like there isn't enough data to declare that conclusively. Additionally, if it makes tobacco consumption not accessible to a younger audience, it seems like that is going to cancel out the benefit (on a societal scale). So, I think it's premature to declare them safer.
deleted 3y ago
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kingstoned 3y ago
"I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty." - Warren Buffett
- sebmellen 3y ago
  The deification of Buffet is strange to see. A lot of the businesses he invests in are just not net positives for society - cigarettes, Dairy Queen, Coca-Cola, etc.
  - SeanAnderson 3y ago
    ice cream isn't a net positive for society? :(
    - objektif 3y ago
      Not really. Coke has a lot of caffeine which makes it a lot more addictive.
      - myshpa 3y ago
        And salt to make you consume more, and acids to destroy your teeth, and sugar for health problems or artificial sweeteners to damage your dna, and microplastics ...
        gruez 3y ago
        >And salt to make you consume more Milk literally has more sodium.
        myshpa 3y ago
        And microplastics too, and sugars, and puss, and blood, pesticides, estrogens ... and? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI
consumer451 3y ago
Crazy and awesome that this is on top of HN right now.[0] I did a double take. This is a sensitive issue. If you were in charge of public health, would you focus on making cigarettes “safer” or on smoking cessation? I would argue both, but I can see the conflict from a health standpoint. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895991
- hammock 3y ago
  >If you were in charge of public health, would you focus on making cigarettes “safer” or on smoking cessation? That question was answered years ago when smoke was banned in pretty much every indoor and outdoor space across America. Would take a pretty big effort to reverse that now. Not saying it couldn’t be done, though
  - consumer451 3y ago
    We humans are such binary thinkers, myself included. If we could somehow silently reduce Polonium-210 in tobacco while also lowering smoking in general, that would be ideal. Japan did it. [0] Why can’t the rest of the world? Smoking is huge in Central and Eastern Europe still. Sadly, I smoke sometimes out here. Wish I could find a brand with lower radioactivity for those times. People have the gear to test for this. A brand comparison would make for a great citizen science Patreon funded video. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905717
- ddingus 3y ago
  Go for safer, put vaping at the top of the harm reduction list. I smoked for a long time. A good vape got me off the real tobacco. Nothing else even came close. The difference is dramatic! Healing happened and I am in great shape today. Hard to tell anything now. Regulate it so people can find safe vapes. And no blame and shame. Everyone knows we sell death sticks to people for profit. Vapes are tame by comparison and offer many possibilities beyond nicotine too.
- SavageBeast 3y ago
  Here in Austin TX, Im told a pack of smokes at the local downtown corner mart (Royal Blue - well known for higher than necessary pricing) is nearing $20! Thats $1 per cigarette. Seems to me simple economics is coming around to address this problem. "Go ahead and keep smoking - smoke as much as you can afford!" For the non-familiar its not uncommon to go through a pack per day between the ones you personally smoke and the ubiquitous people around too cheap to buy their own pack but happy to bum one or more of yours. So lets just say $20 x 6 days a week for $120/week. Thats about $480/month to continue being an active smoker. Take a years worth of that spending and you got yourself a pretty nice vacation.
amluto 3y ago
> insoluble alpha particles bind with resins in the cigarette smoke and get stuck and accumulate at the bronchial bifurcations of the lungs Maybe, when pigs fly, journalists will be able to understand the difference between radiation and radioactivity.
eftychis 3y ago
Maybe, say maybe let us get forward some legislation, adding criminal liability to the executives ignoring such things, explicitly. Because if Purdue taught anything to the U.S. is that their voters do not care. We should prove them wrong I suggest. (Related to the events.) If you think your vote doesn't count: congratulations, the entities you complain about convinced you wrong, and are doing their job. Demonstrate, create groups and demand things from your representative, pick someone from the group you have to run against your representative. There is no democracy otherwise. Time we start caring. These might be called rights on each constitution, but that is a misnomer: they are jobs each citizen needs to do. Sorry, but that is the truth in the end. Disclaimer: Above message is for the residents of every democratic country.
- arsome 3y ago
  Who the hell has time or mental capacity to do any of that when you're just trying to scrape by or make it to the end of the day though?
  - eftychis 3y ago
    The rich: that is why (one of the whys) their votes matter.
  - FollowingTheDao 3y ago
    The answer actually quite simple. Stop using things made mega corporations. It’s probably include many of the companies you’re currently working for. Note I said that it was simple, not easy.
    - eftychis 3y ago
      Agreed. Of course it is not easy. It is a job. But it is worth it.
    - CelticBard 3y ago
      Do you have any tips for us plebs?
tester756 3y ago
Smoking is sad thing It generates so many negative things for barely 1 or two positive and yet people argue for it in the name of some "freedom" How does destroying your and people's around health, getting an addiction, paying bonus $$ to the govt as a additional tax and stinking sound like a "freedom"
- CelticBard 3y ago
  Look I agree with everything you said, but freedom means being free to make "bad" decisions.
  - tester756 3y ago
    I kinda disagree here. When you're addicted you aren't free as in freedom You want to stop smoking, but you cant. Thus smoking which leads to addiction isn't "freedom"
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freedom https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freedom Freedom doesn’t mean making good decisions. It means having the liberty to make a decision, even if it’s not in your own best interest. Do you have a right to destroy your own health? Do you have a right to get yourself addicted to a substance? Do you have a right to smell bad? Does the government have a right to exact a tax to disincentivize bad decisions? Do you have a right to contaminate the air in personal spaces like your own home? Do you have the right to contaminate the air in public spaces? Do you have a right to tell someone else they aren’t allowed to make any number of those decisions? There’s the other side of the transaction as well. Do you have a right to grow something that’s bad for your health? Do you have the right to smoke it? Do you have the right to share it? Do you have the right to sell it? In this case, do you have the right to lie to the person you’re selling it to about whether it’s good/bad for their health? How does that change if you didn’t know it was a lie? How does it change if you did? How does it change if you didn’t know, but you could have known if you’d sought out the information?
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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jongjong 3y ago
Damn. Makes you wonder what kinds of horrible things big companies are doing now which will only be uncovered in the next 20 years or so. What makes tobacco companies less ethical than say big pharma or big tech companies? It's a systemic issue. At the core of this issue is the concept of a corporation. The real cancer are the legal constructs of limited liability and the concept of corporate person-hood. Companies are simply not meant to become so large; they are physically incapable of handling the kind of liability which they will inevitably be exposed to on a global scale. The scale of such companies gives them inertia which allows them to transcend ethical boundaries; with global exposure, they can always find enough people who are unethical enough to undertake the necessary cover-ups to keep things going in a way which maximizes short-term profits. Had the tobacco industry been made up of many smaller businesses, the information would have gotten out sooner as many small tobacco businesses would have voluntarily shuttered their doors in response to the research... But with a handful of gigantic companies headed up by some of the most ethically challenged individuals that all of planet earth could provide, it's not surprising that it didn't happen that way. Capitalism is meant to be composed of small, mostly short-lived businesses that are almost ephemeral in nature. It should be easy to start a new business just as closing an existing business should not be a big deal. Long term inter-generational wealth should be difficult but not impossible to preserve; though it could be preserved using a deflationary currency as a market-neutral store of value; its value would be derived either from trust in the institution or in the automatic mechanism which administers the currency (e.g. the government or public ledger). Imagine what we could achieve with today's technology if only we had kept the efficient capitalist system which our ancestors had designed; a system which proved itself to be efficient during hard times of technological and resource scarcity. Our current system evolved in a post-scarcity environment and therefore it is not optimized for resource efficiency. It's optimized for centralization of power.
cbracketdash 3y ago
Given the nature of the tobacco business (to get people addicted on a pleasure-inducing drug), it's not surprising to see them ignore health risks !
anon7331 3y ago
Honestly, who cares? It's not like people had no idea smoking caused cancer to begin with. They certainly don't care, so why should we?
vondur 3y ago
There are big warnings on cigarette packaging that explicitly warns you that they cause cancer, reproductive harm and emphysema. Adding a warning about radioactivity probably won’t make a difference.
joker_minmax 3y ago
Tobacco also loves to collect uranium and thorium in the root. As much as I want to blame the company here, they're already selling poison. What percentage of it is their fault if the poison is even more poisonous?
- replwoacause 3y ago
  100% of it
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Collecting uranium in plant tissues won't do much to increase Po-210, since the decay chain to Po-210 runs through Ra-226, which has a halflife of 1600 years.
  - joker_minmax 3y ago
    The polonium is not the only thing decaying in the tobacco, is all I meant.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      If you eat uranium, the radioactivity is so low level that the chemical toxicity is more important.
      - joker_minmax 3y ago
        Not eating, though, inhalation of particulates into the lungs.
        pfdietz 3y ago
        I don't think the route of ingestion would alter the point I made.
rationalfaith 3y ago
[dead]
pard68 3y ago
Is this radioactive stuff just the result of burning tobacco or is it added from another element specifically in cigarettes? If it's from tobacco, is it normal for burning plant matter to result in radioactive materials?
_8j50 3y ago
Is it possible to make "clean" cigarettes then? I wish it was possible to take out the nicotine and mix it with something you can smoke without harm.
hasmanean 3y ago
Where does polonium come from in tobacco fields? If it’s in the topsoil then why wouldn’t it be depleted after 3 or 4 crops? Was it released into some Appalachian watershed by Oak Ridge and is therefore in the rivers/groundwater?
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Phosphate fertilizer, I think. It contains some polonium IIRC. Minerals have impurities.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Polonium comes from uranium. It's on the decay chain, via radium and then radon. Soil contains uranium at about the same concentration as the underlying bedrock (typically a few ppm by mass.)
pimpampum 3y ago
Laws that rely on misaligned interests are universally bad.
c8g 3y ago
At least in our country everyone knows that cigarettes causes cancer. Even 50% of the packet required to have warning that says cigarettes causes death. Who cares.
hulitu 3y ago
> Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet And how did Po210 get into the leaves ? Some people suggested fertilizers but then every plant culture might be affected.

296 points by hammock 3y ago

Reminder: cigarettes kill 7x as many people in the US every hour, day, week, and month as the "opiate epidemic" in the USA. One is an "epidemic" and "public health crisis" and access is locked behind a prescription. One is available to anyone 18 or older on each streetcorner.

hammock 3y ago
21*
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mcmoor 3y ago
I knew that my country really won't be prepared with anymore relaxation on narcotics because we smoke cigarettes much more than almost every other country in the world despite long long campaign on health issues. Heck, Big Tobacco manages to capture religious sector! That's how powerful legalized capitalized drugs are.
- yadaeno 3y ago
  Why do people on this forum always say “my country”. Why not just say the name of the country? This information is not useful to anyone without that context.
  - sunnybeetroot 3y ago
    It’s also poor personal infosec if they mention “my country” and include the country name as it reveals a part of their location.
    - patmcc 3y ago
      Most of us aren't all that concerned about country-level doxing.
simmerup 3y ago
So we should give all the cigarette smokers opiates right? Reduce the mortality rate drastically that way.
angelgonzales 3y ago
That may be true but the people who broke into my car twice didn’t do it because they were addicted to nicotine - they did it because they were addicted to opiates.
- krisoft 3y ago
  Hmm. But is that the difference between opiate and nicotine addiction? Or the difference between the restrictions we placed on them? In other words if we would treat tobaco the way we treat the hard drugs, would people addicted to it perform crimes to get their fix on the surely much more expensive black market? I truly don’t know the answer.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  No, they did it because the government supports the prices of opiates, which could easily be made for a nickel a dose. There's nothing intrinsic about opiates that gives you an unquenchable appetite for money. That's cocaine.
rcme 3y ago
What’s the average age of death though?
serf 3y ago
i'm not interested in defending tobacco/cigarettes, but comparisons like this beg the question : do you see a difference between an addiction that leads to eventual chronic health issues/injury/death sometimes many many decades after first-onset versus an addiction that will many times kill even first-time users, and rarely allows for habits that last many decades? if you want to compare the health crises, then divide the results by time to create an 'impact' score. That's why we're focusing on opiates collectively.
version_five 3y ago
This is a pretty poor equivalence, I don't think I need to detail all the reasons, suffice to say a life shortened by smoking is not the same as one destroyed by opiates, either in years lost or in quality of life. Smoking is a poor long term health choice and should be discouraged, it's nothing like what's happening with opiates.
nvllsvm 3y ago
What are the age ranges of people dying from cigarettes vs. opiate abuse?
patmcc 3y ago
Smoking cuts your life expectancy by something like ~10 years. Most of those smoking deaths are people who've already smoked 30+ years; there's not a lot we can do to prevent those deaths now, even if they all stopped smoking tomorrow. They'd still get cancer and everything else at higher rates. We've also done a pretty good job at lower smoking rates, especially among young people. Sure, we can ban or restrict tobacco more (maybe we should) but the "public health crisis" is mostly done. Opiate addiction cuts life expectancy by ~35 years. And getting them onto safer drugs would save lives very immediately. There's stuff that could be done, and everyone knows it, and it's not happening. That's the public health crisis. edit: and, yes, also, opiates are also more socially destructive, due largely to the criminality.
- martinald 3y ago
  This isn't really true. Most of the death from smoking comes from other lung & heart problems, not cancer. As such even if you smoke for many decades and quit your risk decreases dramatically pretty quickly, even within days.
  - patmcc 3y ago
    Quite an interesting chart near the bottom of this page - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/quit_smoking/how_to_quit/benefits/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/quit_smoking/how_to_quit/benefit... - doesn't quantify everything, unfortunately, but yeah even after a year the "risk of heart attack drops sharply". Interesting.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    And even cancer is getting more treatable these days. Lung cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence (although it often does still kill.)
martinald 3y ago
While I'm not suggesting tobacco is fine or anything; they really aren't comparable. Opiate addiction is going to completely take any quality of life away from you (tbh regardless of legality, people that were on prescription opiates still had horrendous disability and mental illness caused by the constant abuse of them, though obviously having to spend hundreds of dollars a day on an illegal supply adds a whole new dimension of horror). Most people who smoke tobacco don't experience any significant quality of life issues until many decades in when the COPD and serious illness starts. Obviously horrible - but I would say you'd lose more than 7x more quality of life (disability adjusted years?) being an opiate addict over being a smoker.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Smokers are functional. Junkies... well, they're junkies. One is a useful member of society, the other is a liability at the best of times. And smokers die old. Quickly too... don't linger on with chronic disease like other old people. Helps keep Medicare solvent.
gerdesj 3y ago
Ex-tabber here, 5.5 years clean, with some remaining ... issues. It is bloody hard to give up, really hard but not impossible. If you want to give up then I do recommend that you prepare yourself mentally. I ended up coming up with a couple of "downside mantras" that I would repeat to myself, whenever thoughts of smoking happened. I initially thought I would use a vape but realized very quickly that would not work for me. If nicotine is the (only) addictive substance then patches, gum, vapes etc would just work. The habit thing is relatively easy to crack but there must be other addictive components to smoking, including sensation (you need to be a smoker to understand that one). Also I didn't want to substitute one thing for another, so abstention was the way to go for me. Some may find help with gum and patches - gum is probably the best substitute, being "active" (and might even improve mouth hygiene). I stopped mid afternoon on a Friday and had a lie in on Saturday. That got me to around 18 hours. I made it to 24 hours. Then I managed two days, then four, then a week (a landmark one day less than the next double - every little helps). Then two weeks. Visited the kids and bummed a drag on a fag and hated it. At around a week my sense of taste and smell re-arrived with a major jolt! I can remember smelling people entering the room and other mad things. It calmed down to normal about week three and I now have a sense of smell that accords with other non smokers. In the end, if you want to give up, then get cracking sooner rather than later and develop strategies but do not try to rely on things like vapes and gum to do it for you. You have to quite literally give yourself a massive mental kicking too. For me I focused on two aspects I hated about smoking and I would mentally repeat this to myself whenever I thought of it: "I don't want to smell and I don't want to die" Even with my denuded sense of smell I could tell I reeked and the second one is pretty obvious. When I did that the craving or thought would be quashed for a while. I did have dreams where I smoked and sometimes woke up convinced I had been smoking. You do have to wrestle with yourself somewhat and decide to win! I continued: ... then a month. Now I have saved £10.50 x 30 = £309 (I thought I smoked 20 a day but I smoked more - self delusion, probably more like 25-30). Cool. ... two months, four months (quarter of a year). Six months. Now I have realistically saved around £2000, have a functional sense of taste and smell and I no longer cough all the time. ... one year. Fuck me, how the hell did I manage that? ... pandemic etc ... 29 July 2023 - rarely think about smoking until an article on HD hoves into view.

csours 3y ago

If you're wondering why this isn't a big deal in food - tobacco leaves have a huge surface area and generally are NOT washed before being dried. Nearly all food IS washed; but this is a good reminder that we live on a real planet, not a model ecosystem, you're eating trace amounts of all kinds of stuff.

hammock 3y ago
The sticky stuff on the tobacco leaves (where most of the Po210 is) is important to the product. Also worth clarifying that the tobacco plant is radiophilic, meaning it proactively takes up radioactive elements into the body of the plant and tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity. It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers
- mandmandam 3y ago
  > It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers Wooow. All these years and I'm still learning new things about how criminally insane those greedy fucks are. Two in a day today. Sure would be cool if any of our well funded institutions did something about it.
- progman32 3y ago
  > tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity. Can you post a source for this? Curious.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    It's complex, but the fertilizer itself is actually the source of the radioactive stuff. Tobacco has the odd characteristic of capturing that and the decay products are things like polonium https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/08/29/radioactive-polonium-in-cigarette-smoke/ https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/08/29/radioactive-pol...
    - yaakov34 3y ago

mentos 3y ago

Kind of like how social media companies know their products are detrimental to the youth that consume them?

veec_cas_tant 3y ago
Maybe I'm way off, but in my mind social media is more like ice cream or fast food companies knowing their product is unhealthy.
- gtvwill 3y ago
  Your way off. Haven't seen ice cream and fast food be responsible for anywhere near as much suicide and detrimental mental health as social media. Folks generally use ice cream to bring you out of that mood not drive it home.
- version_five 3y ago
  I think social media is worse for society than tobacco. Tobacco shortens peoples lives, social media is destroying society. We'd ultimately be better living harmoniously but only until seventy than in civil war and mass upheaval.
  - casey2 3y ago
    Number of civil wars and mass upheaval in the US post social media: 0 Number of civil wars and mass upheaval in the US pre- social media: 1 I'll take social media and quit cigarettes.
    - gtvwill 3y ago
      Lol if you take the number of annual gun deaths in the US each year, you arguably are still in a civil war. 40000+ of your own killed each year just from guns alone. You kill more of yourselves each year than was lost in the entire gulf War of 1990 to 91.
      - 3y ago

tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago

Should have landmark consequences but cashed up lobbies run the show.

User23 3y ago

For what it’s worth this information was publicly available on the Internet in the mid ‘90s if not earlier.

mandmandam 3y ago
... Can you prove that? I'd be interested in a link.

gtvwill 3y ago

What's that you say? We need retrospective criminal charges for this. Hell yes we do! Drag those company boards out of retirement and slap em in jail and size their assets. Unlikely to happen but I can dream.

iTradeWarez 3y ago

Unsurprising and there will be no significant consequences.

stormcode 3y ago

It's a little surprising to me that no company has come out with a 'healthier cigarette'. They could claim to do the acid washing and all the things mentioned in the article in their advertising. Probably without actually saying their cigarettes are healthier but instead focusing on what other companies don't do (the acid wash) and the cancer causing carcinogens their competition's cigarettes contain that their own do not. That would hook people who enjoy smoking but also enjoy not dying. Even if they are just deluding themselves. It would at least get me (former smoker) curious. I've also always wondered if Big Tobbaco was working to cure cancer. It would make business sense. If we cured the types of cancer that smoking causes... A lot more people would probably smoke. (Obviously there are other issues like emphasima).

version_five 3y ago
I think there's lots of regulatory and liability reasons why it's not feasible. Like they're grandfathered in to selling what they do, and nobody wants to entertain ideas of a safer thing, only prohibition. Look at what happened with Juul. Maybe it's changed now, but they had a safer alternative and got shut down. Also as a bit of trivia, iirc from the book "Barbarians at the gate", RJ Reynolds in the 80s was working on a safer cigarette under Ross Johnson that heated the tobacco instead of burning it. Once they got LBO'd and saddled up with debt, that got canned.
- maxbond 3y ago
  > Look at what happened with Juul. Maybe it's changed now, but they had a safer alternative and got shut down. 1. They got in trouble for marketing to teenagers, not for making health claims. 2. They are a going concern, they haven't been shut down. At least not yet. > On June 23, 2022, the FDA denied authorization for Juul to continue selling its products in the United States, and issued Marketing Denial Orders banning any further marketing or sale of the products effective immediately. That order was blocked by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. the next day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juul Regardless, they are only one brand, there are many companies with nearly identical products. 3. I'm not an expert but from what I've read, it seems like the there's evidence they may be safer than smoking, but it seems like there isn't enough data to declare that conclusively. Additionally, if it makes tobacco consumption not accessible to a younger audience, it seems like that is going to cancel out the benefit (on a societal scale). So, I think it's premature to declare them safer.

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kingstoned 3y ago

"I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty." - Warren Buffett

sebmellen 3y ago
The deification of Buffet is strange to see. A lot of the businesses he invests in are just not net positives for society - cigarettes, Dairy Queen, Coca-Cola, etc.
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  ice cream isn't a net positive for society? :(
  - objektif 3y ago
    Not really. Coke has a lot of caffeine which makes it a lot more addictive.
    - myshpa 3y ago
      And salt to make you consume more, and acids to destroy your teeth, and sugar for health problems or artificial sweeteners to damage your dna, and microplastics ...
      - gruez 3y ago
        >And salt to make you consume more Milk literally has more sodium.
        myshpa 3y ago
        And microplastics too, and sugars, and puss, and blood, pesticides, estrogens ... and? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI

consumer451 3y ago

Crazy and awesome that this is on top of HN right now.[0] I did a double take. This is a sensitive issue. If you were in charge of public health, would you focus on making cigarettes “safer” or on smoking cessation? I would argue both, but I can see the conflict from a health standpoint. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895991

hammock 3y ago
>If you were in charge of public health, would you focus on making cigarettes “safer” or on smoking cessation? That question was answered years ago when smoke was banned in pretty much every indoor and outdoor space across America. Would take a pretty big effort to reverse that now. Not saying it couldn’t be done, though
- consumer451 3y ago
  We humans are such binary thinkers, myself included. If we could somehow silently reduce Polonium-210 in tobacco while also lowering smoking in general, that would be ideal. Japan did it. [0] Why can’t the rest of the world? Smoking is huge in Central and Eastern Europe still. Sadly, I smoke sometimes out here. Wish I could find a brand with lower radioactivity for those times. People have the gear to test for this. A brand comparison would make for a great citizen science Patreon funded video. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905717
ddingus 3y ago
Go for safer, put vaping at the top of the harm reduction list. I smoked for a long time. A good vape got me off the real tobacco. Nothing else even came close. The difference is dramatic! Healing happened and I am in great shape today. Hard to tell anything now. Regulate it so people can find safe vapes. And no blame and shame. Everyone knows we sell death sticks to people for profit. Vapes are tame by comparison and offer many possibilities beyond nicotine too.
SavageBeast 3y ago
Here in Austin TX, Im told a pack of smokes at the local downtown corner mart (Royal Blue - well known for higher than necessary pricing) is nearing $20! Thats $1 per cigarette. Seems to me simple economics is coming around to address this problem. "Go ahead and keep smoking - smoke as much as you can afford!" For the non-familiar its not uncommon to go through a pack per day between the ones you personally smoke and the ubiquitous people around too cheap to buy their own pack but happy to bum one or more of yours. So lets just say $20 x 6 days a week for $120/week. Thats about $480/month to continue being an active smoker. Take a years worth of that spending and you got yourself a pretty nice vacation.

amluto 3y ago

> insoluble alpha particles bind with resins in the cigarette smoke and get stuck and accumulate at the bronchial bifurcations of the lungs Maybe, when pigs fly, journalists will be able to understand the difference between radiation and radioactivity.

eftychis 3y ago

Maybe, say maybe let us get forward some legislation, adding criminal liability to the executives ignoring such things, explicitly. Because if Purdue taught anything to the U.S. is that their voters do not care. We should prove them wrong I suggest. (Related to the events.) If you think your vote doesn't count: congratulations, the entities you complain about convinced you wrong, and are doing their job. Demonstrate, create groups and demand things from your representative, pick someone from the group you have to run against your representative. There is no democracy otherwise. Time we start caring. These might be called rights on each constitution, but that is a misnomer: they are jobs each citizen needs to do. Sorry, but that is the truth in the end. Disclaimer: Above message is for the residents of every democratic country.

arsome 3y ago
Who the hell has time or mental capacity to do any of that when you're just trying to scrape by or make it to the end of the day though?
- eftychis 3y ago
  The rich: that is why (one of the whys) their votes matter.
- FollowingTheDao 3y ago
  The answer actually quite simple. Stop using things made mega corporations. It’s probably include many of the companies you’re currently working for. Note I said that it was simple, not easy.
  - eftychis 3y ago
    Agreed. Of course it is not easy. It is a job. But it is worth it.
  - CelticBard 3y ago
    Do you have any tips for us plebs?

tester756 3y ago

Smoking is sad thing It generates so many negative things for barely 1 or two positive and yet people argue for it in the name of some "freedom" How does destroying your and people's around health, getting an addiction, paying bonus $$ to the govt as a additional tax and stinking sound like a "freedom"

CelticBard 3y ago
Look I agree with everything you said, but freedom means being free to make "bad" decisions.
- tester756 3y ago
  I kinda disagree here. When you're addicted you aren't free as in freedom You want to stop smoking, but you cant. Thus smoking which leads to addiction isn't "freedom"
r3trohack3r 3y ago
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freedom https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freedom Freedom doesn’t mean making good decisions. It means having the liberty to make a decision, even if it’s not in your own best interest. Do you have a right to destroy your own health? Do you have a right to get yourself addicted to a substance? Do you have a right to smell bad? Does the government have a right to exact a tax to disincentivize bad decisions? Do you have a right to contaminate the air in personal spaces like your own home? Do you have the right to contaminate the air in public spaces? Do you have a right to tell someone else they aren’t allowed to make any number of those decisions? There’s the other side of the transaction as well. Do you have a right to grow something that’s bad for your health? Do you have the right to smoke it? Do you have the right to share it? Do you have the right to sell it? In this case, do you have the right to lie to the person you’re selling it to about whether it’s good/bad for their health? How does that change if you didn’t know it was a lie? How does it change if you did? How does it change if you didn’t know, but you could have known if you’d sought out the information?
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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jongjong 3y ago

Damn. Makes you wonder what kinds of horrible things big companies are doing now which will only be uncovered in the next 20 years or so. What makes tobacco companies less ethical than say big pharma or big tech companies? It's a systemic issue. At the core of this issue is the concept of a corporation. The real cancer are the legal constructs of limited liability and the concept of corporate person-hood. Companies are simply not meant to become so large; they are physically incapable of handling the kind of liability which they will inevitably be exposed to on a global scale. The scale of such companies gives them inertia which allows them to transcend ethical boundaries; with global exposure, they can always find enough people who are unethical enough to undertake the necessary cover-ups to keep things going in a way which maximizes short-term profits. Had the tobacco industry been made up of many smaller businesses, the information would have gotten out sooner as many small tobacco businesses would have voluntarily shuttered their doors in response to the research... But with a handful of gigantic companies headed up by some of the most ethically challenged individuals that all of planet earth could provide, it's not surprising that it didn't happen that way. Capitalism is meant to be composed of small, mostly short-lived businesses that are almost ephemeral in nature. It should be easy to start a new business just as closing an existing business should not be a big deal. Long term inter-generational wealth should be difficult but not impossible to preserve; though it could be preserved using a deflationary currency as a market-neutral store of value; its value would be derived either from trust in the institution or in the automatic mechanism which administers the currency (e.g. the government or public ledger). Imagine what we could achieve with today's technology if only we had kept the efficient capitalist system which our ancestors had designed; a system which proved itself to be efficient during hard times of technological and resource scarcity. Our current system evolved in a post-scarcity environment and therefore it is not optimized for resource efficiency. It's optimized for centralization of power.

cbracketdash 3y ago

Given the nature of the tobacco business (to get people addicted on a pleasure-inducing drug), it's not surprising to see them ignore health risks !

anon7331 3y ago

Honestly, who cares? It's not like people had no idea smoking caused cancer to begin with. They certainly don't care, so why should we?

vondur 3y ago

There are big warnings on cigarette packaging that explicitly warns you that they cause cancer, reproductive harm and emphysema. Adding a warning about radioactivity probably won’t make a difference.

joker_minmax 3y ago

Tobacco also loves to collect uranium and thorium in the root. As much as I want to blame the company here, they're already selling poison. What percentage of it is their fault if the poison is even more poisonous?

replwoacause 3y ago
100% of it
pfdietz 3y ago
Collecting uranium in plant tissues won't do much to increase Po-210, since the decay chain to Po-210 runs through Ra-226, which has a halflife of 1600 years.
- joker_minmax 3y ago
  The polonium is not the only thing decaying in the tobacco, is all I meant.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    If you eat uranium, the radioactivity is so low level that the chemical toxicity is more important.
    - joker_minmax 3y ago
      Not eating, though, inhalation of particulates into the lungs.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        I don't think the route of ingestion would alter the point I made.

rationalfaith 3y ago

[dead]

pard68 3y ago

Is this radioactive stuff just the result of burning tobacco or is it added from another element specifically in cigarettes? If it's from tobacco, is it normal for burning plant matter to result in radioactive materials?

_8j50 3y ago

Is it possible to make "clean" cigarettes then? I wish it was possible to take out the nicotine and mix it with something you can smoke without harm.

hasmanean 3y ago

Where does polonium come from in tobacco fields? If it’s in the topsoil then why wouldn’t it be depleted after 3 or 4 crops? Was it released into some Appalachian watershed by Oak Ridge and is therefore in the rivers/groundwater?

HPsquared 3y ago
Phosphate fertilizer, I think. It contains some polonium IIRC. Minerals have impurities.
pfdietz 3y ago
Polonium comes from uranium. It's on the decay chain, via radium and then radon. Soil contains uranium at about the same concentration as the underlying bedrock (typically a few ppm by mass.)

pimpampum 3y ago

Laws that rely on misaligned interests are universally bad.

c8g 3y ago

At least in our country everyone knows that cigarettes causes cancer. Even 50% of the packet required to have warning that says cigarettes causes death. Who cares.

hulitu 3y ago

> Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet And how did Po210 get into the leaves ? Some people suggested fertilizers but then every plant culture might be affected.