Do cigarettes expire? Not if they have asbestos in them!
There aren’t too many products as bad for your lungs as breathing asbestos, but one of them is smoking cigarettes. So it’s a bit mind-boggling to realize that cigarettes used to be sold with asbestos filters. Maybe even more mind-boggling, the asbestos-filtered cigarettes were sold as a healthier alternative. Let’s take a look.
Welcome to Asbestos Artifacts, where we take a look at some old asbestos products and dig a little bit into the story behind them. I’m asbestos attorney Justinian C. Lane. Today’s asbestos artifact is a box of Kent Cigarettes.
...with Asbestos Filters!
In fact, the most popular brand of filtered cigarettes had filters made with asbestos…and not just asbestos: crocidolite, also known as blue asbestos, the most dangerous kind to inhale.
These have all been smoked, unfortunately for whoever smoked them…but this is a real empty pack of Kent cigarettes, which really was the first popular filtered cigarette. Let’s back up a second–
Cigarettes came to America in the mid-1800s; sailors brought them to the Northeast, and from Latin America through Louisiana to the South. By the Civil War they were popular, but pipes and cigars were still popular. Cigarettes were expensive, they had to be rolled by hand.
So the cigarette industry offered a $75,000 prize to the person who could invent a machine that rolls cigarettes. And a guy named James Bonsack did it, revolutionizing the industry. Handrollers rolled about four per minute, or 200 cigarettes in a work shift. Bonsack’s machine could roll 200 cigarettes per minute, 20,000 a day,
Demand for cigarettes doubled in the U.S. every five years. The temperance movement, which had banned drinking, also tried to ban smoking, saying it was immoral and unhealthy. But during WW I, it grew very popular, and Army surgeons said cigarettes helped wounded people relax and eased their pain. People didn’t realize just how unhealthy it was, and that’s why cigarettes did not have filters.
But what happened is, by the 1950s doctors had realized that cigarettes cause cancer. They published about it in medical journals, but what really set it off was when an article was published in Reader’s Digest. For people who don’t know, long before the Internet, Reader’s Digest was the magazine that everyone in the country read to stay up on what was going on in the world. The magazine is actually still around,
The Reader’s Digest article was one of the first publications to just come out and say that cigarettes could cause cancer, and the public reaction was quick. People were wondering if they should quit smoking. The cigarette industry had to figure out what they were going to do. One company, Lorillard Tobacco, came up with their strategy:
KENT entered the filter field with extremely strong advertising based on health protection claims as demonstrated with the smoke test…and the brand got off to a remarkable start in spite of the fact that it cost four cents a pack more than competitive brands.
Discredit the science, muddy the waters, and sell their own alternative to quitting smoking, by rejecting the cancer claims, saying the problem was ‘tar’, and say that cigarette filters solved the problem.
There were a few filtered brands of cigarettes, but they weren’t very popular.
Lorillard also launched a full marketing campaign for Kent cigarettes marketing them as a healthy smoking alternative, placing ads in American Medical Association journals claiming that an AMA study (which they invented) proves that of all the cigarette filters, the micronite filter is best at removing tar. They claimed that Micronite filters offered “the greatest health protection in history.”
It worked. Kent quickly became the leading brand of filtered cigarettes, and Lorillard’s sales ballooned. In their first four years, Lorillard sold 13 billion Kent Micronite-filtered cigarettes. But anyone smoking them was directly inhaling asbestos. Micronite wasn’t scientific, it was a brand name for a mix of crepe paper and asbestos.
Micronite is a bit like asbestos - asbestos is an industry term for a group of minerals with similar properties. Maybe that’s appropriate since the so-called Micronite filters were made of crepe paper, and asbestos.
Asbestos is fibrous but extremely durable and resistant to things like heat and acid and rust - so for a long time, the industry used it, ironically, to filter out contaminating particles.
The chemical company Hollingsworth and Vose made air filtration paper, used in all kinds of air vents. As part of their marketing campaign, Lorillard was famously secretive about the exact formula of micronite. But we know it contained Hollingsworth and Vose’s filter paper, made of crocidolite fibers.
If you inhale asbestos fibers into the lungs, they get embedded, and after several decades they cause health problems of all kinds, including cancer.....
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