What is tobacco?

Tobacco is an agricultural crop that is used to make cigarettes. It is grown all over the world and is then dried and processed. It is either placed into cigarettes and processed, or manufactured for chewing tobacco.

  • It can be smoked in a cigarette, pipe, or cigar. It can be chewed (called smokeless tobacco or chewing tobacco) or sniffed through the nose (called snuff).
  • The psychoactive ingredient is nicotine, a stimulant, but more than 4,000 other chemicals (2,000 of which are known to be poisonous) are present in cigarettes.
    Nicotine is the chemical that makes tobacco addictive or habit forming. Once we smoke, chew, or sniff tobacco, nicotine goes into our bloodstream, and our body wants more. The nicotine in tobacco makes it a drug, which results in physical and psychological dependence.
  • Nicotine is a deadly poison in high doses. One drop (70 mg) can kill an average adult.
  • Apart from nicotine, tobacco contains 230 toxic chemicals that play a role in the onset of cancer.

Tobacco & its products

Tobacco products differ mostly in the way they are used and, consequently, the way they injure users. Cigarettes are the most common form of tobacco used, but cigars and smokeless tobacco are every bit as dangerous. All tobacco causes cancer; cigars and cigarettes most commonly cause lung cancer, but they can lead to a variety of other cancers, as well. Smokeless tobacco, on the other hand, mostly causes cancer of the mouth, throat, and stomach. All tobacco use also leads to heart disease. All tobacco contains nicotine, which is a highly addictive drug, but the different products have different amounts. For example, one cigar has as much nicotine as almost three packs of cigarettes. A cigar can contain up to 444 mg of nicotine, while a cigarette can contain up to 11 mg of nicotine! A pocket-size packet of smokeless tobacco contains as much nicotine as three packs of cigarettes. The moister the tobacco, the higher the nicotine content.

All tobacco also contains a variety of toxic chemicals. Cigar smoke has the same poisons and chemicals that cause cancer as cigarette smoke and contains higher levels of some of those chemicals. Smokeless tobacco contains formaldehyde, which is embalming fluid, nitrosamine and benzopyrene, which are known carcinogens, and Uranium 235 and Polonium 210, both of which are nuclear products. In all, chewing tobacco (or spit tobacco) contains at least 28 cancer-causing chemicals!