From a Mother Jones article about the book Golden Holocaust, a compendium of terrible things the tobacco industry has done, by Robert Proctor [bold added]:

By his own estimate, Proctor spent a decade poring over more than 100,000 tobacco industry documents unearthing details such as a primer on how to reach “young starters” and a 1970 Lorillard memo suggesting that “Negroes” smoke menthols to “mask” their “real/mythical odor.” The 57-year-old prof is a walking encyclopedia of tobacco arcana, apt to mention things like “beaver,” a rodent anal secretion sometimes added to cigarettes, perhaps to enhance “pack aroma.” Or that as much as 90 percent of America’s licorice supply is used as a cigarette sweetener. (Honey, chocolate, and sugar are also employed to make cigarette smoke more inhalable—and thus more addictive.) Or that around 4 percent of a cigarette’s weight is made up of humectants like propylene glycol—basically antifreeze. “You can put things in cigarettes you can’t put in dog food,” Proctor says.

This article appears in May 10-16, 2012.

The editor of the Tucson Weekly. I have no idea how I got here.

5 replies on “Today in Gross Things People Say Are in Cigarettes”

  2. Oh yeah, and I should mention that an additive such as castoreum is considered a “natural ingredient” so you won’t see it in a list of ingredients.

    You really just can’t get more natural than beaver butt.

  3. Sweet you got cigarettes licked. Now can you tell us what is in hot dogs? Or ooh start with something easy maybe, like milk. Weird how that lasts twice as long as it did 20 years ago, right? UFO technology or weirder I bet, right? And hey don’t want seem pushy, except a decade seems a little silly. Can you just read the reports and then get back to us? Thanks. You are doing a wonderful job bro.

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