MC Pipe Blog: Tobacco Theory.
- DRAllen201
- Jun 22, 2018
- 4 min read
Recently I was looking around for something interesting to read online. What I found was an article about the differences between cigarette tobacco and roll your own tobacco and the myth that roll-your-own has fewer additives than regular cigarette ‘baccy.
I was fascinated by the article until I came across a broad claim that went a little like this: “The report, obtained under Freedom of Information, shows factory-made cigarettes had just 0.2% of additives (by weight) out of total tobacco; roll-your-own cigarette tobacco had 22.5%; pipe tobacco had a third by total weight in additives.” – Simon Chapman Emeritus Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney.
Now, I’m no professor, but I’m pretty sure that one document in which you pull data out that looks like it shows your proof is a logical fallacy. The excerpt from a New Zealand shows an imported tobacco order from a company in the 1990’s with the following numbers.
Cigarettes Imported – 879,219 kg Additives – 1,803 kg (1803/879219×100 = 0.21%)
Pipe Tobacco Imported – 6,695 kg Additives – 2,227 kg (2227/6695×100 = 33.62%)
So if these numbers are to be believed, then pipe tobacco has more additives by weight than cigarettes, which the math has demonstrated above shows. The misleading part is that we have no idea about how many additives would be in a standard dosage of tobacco by product and there is no mention of WHAT those additives are.
A basic internet search will tell you that there are approximately 599 additives in cigarettes. I will list you some of my favourites: Acetone: Nail Polish Remover, Acetic Acid: Hair Dye, Ammonia: household cleaning product, Arsenic: used in rat poison, Benzene: found in rubber cement, Butane: lighter fluid and Nicotine (stipulated to also be in pipe tobacco) – insecticide.
Now a basic internet search for pipe tobacco additives lead me to exactly one PDF from the makers of Orlik products, in which they break down all additives in each one of their products. The most common of these are: of course Nicotine, propylene glycol, glycol, sugar, and various other food grade flavourings (A link to this PDF and all other sources will be provided at the end of the article.)
Now if you are like me you’ve been wondering about how much of these additives in each smoke. Since I am a pipe smoker and know that a bowl of pipe tobacco averages 3 grams, I will need to determine a baseline for this theory. Using 33.62% as a baseline I can simply multiply 3 gr by .3362 and get the amount of the additives in the average pipe bowl, which is 1.0089 grams. Now using the figure of 1000 cigarettes contain 2.28 pounds of ingredients inside the tube, we can change to grams and the find out the exact amount. So, 454 grams equals a pound, thus (454×2.28)/1000 = 1.04 grams per cigarette of tobacco and additives. Now we have to bring this up to the same amount as one bowl of tobacco in a pipe, so 3.12 grams. Yes, it is a tiny bit more, but for these, it is close enough. Now we take 3.12 grams and multiply by 0.0021 to get 0.0066 grams additives in 3 cigarettes.
Seems like I’ve proven the original case doesn’t it? What you and the author of the original author may not have taken into account is the amount of tobacco smoked over time. When I was a cigarette smoker I had a half pack a day habit (25 pack) so that would mean I averaged 12.5 that’s 0.026 grams cigarette additives a day, now over the course of a month with 31 days that would equal 387.5 cigarettes or 0.818 grams per month, 9.6 grams a year (365×0.0066) and that over a 5 year time frame comes to a grand total of 48.18 grams of additives such as arsenic and butane.
Now I smoke a pipe a lot less than I did cigarettes but since the additive content is stipulated to be higher you can expect to get more of them with less usage. I smoke an average of 2 pipes a week, that’s 6 grams of tobacco or 2.0178 grams of additives per week, but to get a proper daily number that has to be divided by 7 for days, so that is 0.288 grams of additives per day. Following the same progression as was done for cigarettes you would get 8.94 grams per 31 day month, 105.21 per the calendar year and finally 526.069 grams over 5 years of additives. That effectively proves the validity of the claim that cigarettes contain fewer additives, not just by weight but also by amount consumed….. for me. Also consider those additives are food grade, and I think less likely to kill you over time than some additives like arsenic
Now I had thought about running through the calculations for heavier pipe and cigarette smokers but decided it was pointless because when using the numbers above I will always prove that pipe smokers get more additives than cigarette smokers. Also, no matter how hard I tried I could not find any and I mean any other list detailing additives by weight for pipe tobacco. Given the lack of other sources, I have to say that I don’t find this theory to credible.
There you have it, a hypothesis tested to yield some unexpected results…. but remember, that’s just a theory, a tobacco theory! Thanks for looking and good smokes.
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