Citation Needed - Cigarettes

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

A cigarette is a narrow cylinder containing burnable material, typically tobacco, that is rolled into thin paper for smoking. The cigarette is ignited at one end, causing it to smolder; the resulting smoke is orally inhaled via the opposite end. Cigarette smoking is the most common method of tobacco consumption. Manufacturers have described the cigarette as "a drug administration system for the delivery of nicotine in acceptable and attractive form".[1][2][3][4] The term cigarette, as commonly used, refers to a tobacco cigarette, but the word is sometimes used to refer to other substances, such as a cannabis cigarette or an herbal cigarette. A cigarette is distinguished from a cigar by its usually smaller size, use of processed leaf, and paper wrapping, which is typically white. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

Okay, but if a kicker gets them the point for sure every time, why don't they just kick all the time like whenever they get close? I don't know man, I don't even know what sport you're talking about. Yeah, that's fair. There he is! Finally, explain yourself. Huh? This! Uh, it's a bottle of poison.

Yeah. Exactly, but look at this! The label? Yeah! Exactly, but look at this. The label. Yeah. It says warning. Drinking poison may cause death. Okay. Okay, okay.

But how do you explain the poster of a sexy lady drinking poison? So sexy. So sexy. And you did this? Yeah. No, I did all this. See.

I knew we did it. I knew it. I mean, it seems like Eli wants you to drink the poison without taking responsibility for you drinking the poison. Exactly. Can you believe it? Totally. That's it.

Okay. So I mean, the solution seems pretty obvious. Yeah, of course. Well, obviously. Yeah. We drank the poison for like 10 years and then we stopped, right? Well, it's maybe 20 or 30. But yeah. Okay.

Sexy lady, influential. Very sexy. And lo and welcome to Citation Needed. The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works down. I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be peer-pressuring you into listening to this episode, but I'll need some cool kids that are doing it first.

First up, do man who kicked this week's subject to the curb, but they'll never quench the love in their hearts, Cecil and Noah. I quit smoking before it was cool, man. Before it was cool. Well, I feel like I'll never quench the increased plaque deposits in my heart. I'll wait a minute. And also joining us tonight, a man who probably didn't realize that eating the whole pack of cigarettes was a punishment. Tom. Yeah, it was a tough punishment. That's sure, but I mean, to get to flavor country, you've got to come a long way. sure but I mean to get to flavor country you've got to come a long way. Before we begin tonight I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons patrons. It's

thanks to you that we can support me and Tom's far far more expensive addiction children. The habit you just can't do it anytime. Seriously even if you kick them like just once they call the cops on you it's a whole thing. Anyways if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to tick around to the end of the show with that out of the way. Tell us Cecil, because he's not here to arbitrarily decide how the format of our fucking podcast goes. What person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon or event? I got to do a clean version of that. Why? Because I'm keeping going to be talking about today. Today we'll be talking about cigarettes. And Noah, you got the scoop on these little white tubes of death.

Are you ready to break up with them intellectually as well as physically? I'm going to be talking about cigarettes. I'm going to be talking about cigarettes. I'm going to be talking about cigarettes. I'm going to be talking about cigarettes. I'm going to be talking about cigarettes. I'm going to be talking about cigarettes. I'm going to be talking about cigarettes.

I'm going to be talking about cigarettes. I'm going to be talking about cigarettes and no you got the scoop on these little white tubes of death are you ready to break up with them intellectually as well as physically? Sure, but I can't promise I won't drunk dial them at 3 a.m. at some point in the future. Yeah, of course. So this is what I was gone so journalism episode we've ever done. Right. Right. Like, we commitments. I'm on the fuckers. You can say that about my broanie's episode. Drifted a lot of that porn. So what are cigarettes?

Well, they are the world's greatest preventable cause of death. I mean, there are a lot of other things beyond that, but I feel like that fact supplied by the World Health Organization deserves a place right up front in any discussion about cigarettes. But in terms of the words definition, here's what the Wikipedia article offers. Quote, a cigarette is a narrow cylinder containing burnable material, typically tobacco,

which is rolled into thin paper for smoking. End quote. Now they include the modifier typically since the term cigarette is occasionally applied to joints and is shared with herbal cigarettes. but for our purposes, we're just going to worry about the tobacco-based ones in this essay. And let's not forget about clove cigarettes, which smell like a vampire, the masquerade larp.

I see. So it's either smoke cloves or take a shower. So it's close. I like clove cigarettes. You know why? They only kill people who deserve it. That's close. I like love cigarettes. You know why they only kill people who deserve it. That's it, right? So okay.

So we'll start with tobacco itself, which is the common name for several plants from the Nikotiana genus, probably mispronounce in that. There are at least 70 different known species of tobacco, but the one most often used in commercial tobacco products is Nikotiano Tobacco. Though some countries apparently use a more potent variety called Nicotiano Rustica.

The history of tobacco use starts in the South and Central America and stretches back to at least 1400 BCE with some archaeological finds suggesting it may have been in use as much as 12,000 years earlier. Okay. The fact that a deeply held part of the human experience is putting something in your face and lighting it on fire. They have a spoiler about the ending in my opinion. Okay, Eli, but you ever get like too close to a camp fire and start choking on the smoke? Well, what if we could bring that experience even closer to your lips?

That's what they had to be thinking. Yeah. Now, so long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, tobacco use had pretty much spread all over both continents or at least to all the places that could feasibly grow the shit. In Eastern North America, it was readily accepted trade item, almost a currency and was used in both religious ceremonies and ceremonies to officialize a treaty or agreement. Native Americans also used it for a bunch of medicinal purposes with mixed results.

It was used as a painkiller for earaches and two thigs and some indigenous Californians smoked it with a mix of other herbs as a treatment for colts. Now, if you think that the idea of smoking cough, medicine sounds crazy, I should add that they also used that mixed to treat asthma and tuberculosis. He's so nice.

That's gonna to work. Fortunately, that practice seems to be long dead. But tobacco is still in use in religious ceremonies by a lot of indigenous Americans, especially in Canada and the North Central US. Yeah. In my high school in upstate New York, we had an ancient custom where some of my classmates would try to cure themselves of going to high school by smoking outside between classes, highly effective, by the way,

man. They nailed it. Now, of course, pre-Columbia in America didn't have paper. So the tobacco use we're talking about was pretty much in pipes. Those cigars were popular in some areas. Yes. The cigars are like the tobacco equivalent of that KFC fried chicken sandwich where the bread is just actually more fried chicken.

Yeah, double down, double down, both are equally dangerous to consume. Actually, cigar to get fried chickens. You're forgetting the necessity of the bacon and the cheese. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. Call the double down. Now, even before Europeans were introduced to tobacco, apparently they were already smoking pipes.

There's a Spanish phone from the 13th century that mentions smoking a pipe full of lavender and apparently ancient Romans and Greek smoked hemp seeds out of pipes. That sounds more like a headache by way of a fireworks display than anything else. But pipes would transform from a niche thing that was used in a couple of distant locations to ubiquity pretty quick after the European introduction of tobacco. After hearing about the hemp seeds, pop-eye welding metal plates together with this pipe makes a lot more sense. Right.

Yeah. It was the pop rocks and seven up of the time, right? Right. Yeah, the co-consmentos, if you're okay. Exactly. As it turns out, we actually have a record of the first time Europeans encountered tobacco, though there is some question about its veracity. The Spanish bishop and historian, Barola Maedela Cossus, described the discovery from the

first Scouts Columbus sent out into the interior of Cuba. Quote, by the way, run on sentences where no problem back in the day. Men with half burned wood in their hands and certain herbs to make their smokes, which are some dry herbs put in a certain leaf also dry like those that the boys made on the day of the Passover of the Holy Ghost, and having lighted one part of it by the other they suck also like the boys at church on Passover. Oh God. Yeah, the other they suck absorb or receive smoke inside the breath by which they become

benumbed and almost drunk. And so it is said they do not feel fatigue, end of single sentence. Jesus. Yeah, right? He adds, I knew Spaniards on the island of Espanola, who are accustomed to take it and being reprimanded for it by telling them that it was a vice. They replied they were unable to cease using it." And, quote, cue cigarette executives tenting their fingers and laughing quietly.

Right. Yeah. So, look, I smoked cigarettes for a solid 30 years. I was never a benumbed drunk or unable to feel fatigue because of it. I feel like maybe Las Casas fell for a, no man, these are just cigarettes type excuse. Though it's entirely possible that his account was a fair description of how Europeans acted

the first time they encountered tobacco. I mean, it got crazy popular, some fucking howling, it wasn't because the cool kids were doing it yet. Okay. The legitimate question, if cigarettes don't get you high, what's the point like before you're addicted? Right, I know when you're addicted,

you need them not to kill a lady in an Irish airport, but before that, are you just like putting in the work, like a concert pianist? What's going on? Okay, Eli, it's just like coffee. The first few times you try it, you do get a pretty substantial jolt, but after a minute,

you convince yourself that you're fussing over the perfect temperature for your little cup of angry, bitter hot water. When in the back of your mind, you just really want to hurry the fuck up and drink it so you can finally take a shit. Well, that and the fact that all the cool kids are doing it. Yeah. So like Tom forgot my coffee order. So tobacco quickly became one of the main commodities to make its way from the so-called new world back to Europe.

It was introduced around 1528 and within a few years there was a thriving tobacco industry in Spain, Portugal and France at least. Now legend has it that it was first introduced to England in 1586 by Sir Walter Rale. But that legend is definitely not true. It's just, it's hard to believe that there was a thriving trade and the stuff all around mainland Europe for 50 years and the British Isles just failed to notice. And what's more, there are plenty of credible accounts from at least a dozen years earlier

that talk about people smoking tobacco in England. But I have to bring up the legend anyway, because in it, Sir Walter Rale servant sees him smoking a pipe, assumes that the inside of his head is on fire and dumps a pale of water over top. Right. That's also probably not true, but it's just too good to leave out. This servant is like spending hours pouring water on the outside of a wood stove to put

it out. Is this pouring it over and over? All right, but you will, if he'd squirted up his nose or something, it would have been worse. So I guess it's good that he's dumb. Now, addiction and the mild buzz they offered definitely was the main driver of tobacco's popularity in Europe, but it also was offered up paradoxically as a fantasy by a lot of 16th century doctors. In a famous 1571 book about the history of medicinal plants, Spanish doctor

Nicholas Monardes claimed that tobacco could cure no fewer than three dozen health problems, but not everybody was on board with the newly popular habit in 1604. Stuart King James I wrote a famous polem announcing tobacco use that referred to it as quote, loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is Amazing quote, right? Yeah, it's a bit hyperbolic, but it's way closer to the truth and the doctors at the time were getting So yeah, I really is a testimony though to how powerful an addiction nicotine creates when you consider how truly awful cigarettes do smell

It's like yep for generations. It's like everybody was walking around smearing limb burger cheese and durian fruit into their hair and clothes And then everyone was like man, that is cool Yeah, so a tobacco apparently showed up in Asia around the same time, though it took longer to gain popularity. It was first introduced to Japan by Portuguese sailors in 1542, and it took off in the Ottoman Empire a few decades later. I got popular as a medicine at first, but then it was banned by Sultan Mirad IV in 1633, and nothing makes people want something more than telling them they can't have it so it's popularly really took off from there.

Mirad successor who has the fucking fascinating sobrake of ibrahim the mad reversed the ban and started making a fortune taxing the shit and started to be so quote heavy in this episode by have to offer up this line from obid al-Ghani al-Nabulse that's a jurist from Damascus who wrote this in 1682. Quote, tobacco has now become extremely famous in all the countries of Islam. People of all kinds have used it and devoted themselves to it. I have seen young children of about five years applying themselves to it. Okay.

And, quote, now I feel like people are going to be smoking Iverch then in 300 years, 300 years. Once it gets started. Meanwhile, back in America, tobacco was fast becoming the cash crop, especially in the British colonies. The larger areas gobbled up by Spain and Portugal had far more valuable resources to exploit like golden silver. But in the 13 colonies, there was very little in the way of precious natural resources. And the soil was too rich for traditional European crops like cereal and barley. So tobacco was one of the few things that they could reliably grow and sell abroad. That being said, tobacco growing is far more labor intensive than those food crops, and it's really awful fucking work.

So among all the terrible things that tobacco was going to do to humanity over the next few centuries, it was also one of the chief drivers of the transatlantic slave trade. Tobacco executives still tenting their fingers and laughing. Yeah, you're going to do a lot of that. I love the idea that slavery was motivated by work being just a bit too unpleasant, right? Like a racist guy from the South was like, look, I was happy to do potatoes and corn on my own, but this tobacco shit is laborious. Fine.

I will take indefinite free labor, but you're right. Yeah, right. What's your mom? No, I want to do it. So tobacco would remain America's chief crash crop until the invention of the cotton gin. You like the wit, the wit, neither. Yeah, that's him.

At the end of the 18th century. And even as late as 1883, apparently tobacco excise tax is accounted for one third of the revenue collected by the US government. Yeah, the tobacco gin never really took off though, you know. That's because it was so hard to pair with the right tobacco tonic. Right. Yeah, that's because you got to filter it. If you filter it.

But in the wake of the Civil War and the freeing of American slaves, the production of tobacco had to change. Until this point, tobacco is mostly smoked in pipes or chewed, but it turned out that you can get away with putting way lower quality shit into pre-rolled cigarettes, so the manufacturers started leaning that way more and more. Technology helped in that regard. In 1880, an inventor by the name of James Albert Bonsack. No, really.

Nope. It's a hub to cigarette rolling machine that vastly increased the potential production of cigarettes. According to the Wiki article, in the wake of Bonsaxe invention, cigarette companies went from hand rolling about 40,000 cigarettes a day to making around four million. Needless to say, this was not going to work out well for American lungs. All right. Well, it sounds like Noah's about to explain how big tobacco forced cigarettes into people's mouths multiple times a day for the rest of his free. So we'll take a quick break for a little apple or a pole or nothing.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Ah, nothing quite like a quiet pipe by the fire. I'm coming, sir! Dammit, Jenkins! What are you doing? Oh, I thought the inside of your head was on fire. What's now? It's because of all the smoke. How the hell would the inside of my head catch fire, but not the outside?

Oh, maybe you ate a candle? That's not how that works. And even if it was, you thought my reaction to the inside of my head being on fire was to sit quietly in a chair with a smile on my face. Well, think of maybe you hadn't noticed yet. Did my head was on fire? I don't know, so it is the 1500 isn't it? Ah, that's fair.

Well, would you like to try some? Now I think I'm gonna stick the vapes. Sure, sure. All right, when we left off tobacco, it'd seen humanity murder its parents and it's sworn its revenge. What happened next, no? All right, so to be clear, cigarettes have clear antecedents that go all the way back to the ninth century in Mexico and the Caribbean. But we don't have a hell of a lot in the way of historical record.

There's no clear delineation between cigars and cigarettes. So generally, these early forms of cigarettes are just referred to as cigars or small cigars. The word cigarette was first coined in France around 1845 and following the longstanding English tradition of trying to make shit sound fancy by using the French term for it, it was adopted in England a few years later. But the use of cigarettes didn't really take off until their manufacturer was industrialized by the late 1880s, and from there, it's spreading a fucking cancer. Okay, and this is immediately post-industrial revolution. So you just know at least every third cigarette had some percentage of kid meat that fell into the machine That was a jungle out there now

It's it's believed that at first cigarettes were used like pipes and cigars in that the smoke wasn't generally inhaled The wiki actually said to Lucky Strike ad campaign from the 1930s that asked customers do you inhale? But over time manufacturers cultivated strains that were ever milder, ever less acidic, and the idea of sucking down a lung full of carbon monoxide became less and less distasteful to the average person. And that's when the habit really took off. So numbers vary a ton from country to country, from decade to decade, but just using the US as an example.

In 1900, the average per capita consumption of cigarettes was 54 per year. Okay, now that's an average that includes non-smokers, but fewer than half a percent of the American population smoked more than 100 cigarettes per year. By 1965, that's when tobacco use peaked in the United States. That number was 4,259 per year. What? That's better than half a pack a day,

even when you average in non-smokers. Jesus. Whoa. And even in 1965, by the way, non-smokers were still the majority of adults. According to the same source at the time, half of men and about one third of women were regular smokers.

Yeah, but that tobacco use also includes a popular 1940s recipe from the Paul Mall cookbook where you pressed loose tobacco onto the sides of your freshly frosted chocolate. That's true. That's true. Tom had that every year for his birthday. Yeah, probably. That's probably your birthday.

They didn't have notes of tobacco in your cake, whatever. Outrageous. No, Rages. No, of course, well, my dad smoked in the house, everything had so much tobacco in his labor. Yeah. No, of course, some of the explosion and popularity of cigarettes came from the fact that nicotine, of course, is the active ingredient tobacco is among the most addictive

substances known to humanity. But a lot of it was also due to slick advertising campaigns. Until 1971, they advertised them on radio and TV with catchy little jingles and shit, and as hard as this to comprehend today, they were often sold as health products. Right? So, vice-reuys were advertised as dentist-recommendant. L&M work, quote, just what the doctor ordered. And RJ Reynolds, of course, famously promoted their brand by telling people that work quote, just what the doctor ordered. And RJ Reynolds, of course, famously promoted their brand

by telling people that, quote, more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette, end quote. And this last factor, by the way, I didn't know this until I started researching for this essay. I love this so God damn much. You couldn't just say that you had to have some survey that proved it or whatever. So the way they got that was that

RJ Reynolds conducted surveys at medical conventions after giving the doctors a free pack of camels. They would literally they would have one guy give out a pack of camels to every doctor early in the day and a different guy ask those doctors what kind of cigarettes they had in their pockets later in the day. I mean, to be fair, when you're selling a literal death stick as a health product, peaking your surveys kind of adorable, could I compare it? Yeah, technically wise, I mean, the Sackler Bowers pretty much did the same thing. So, okay. All right, yeah.

Now, I should be clear that way before scientific bodies and medical associations were willing to confirm the dangers of cigarette smoking, people were already starting to figure it out on their own. Okay. Like cigarettes were already being referred to as cough and nails in the late 1800s. And the term smokers cough was in use by the 1920s at the latest. Tobacco companies combated that reputation through the aforementioned bullshit health advertisements and also by introducing filtered cigarettes, which very much don't make them any healthier. In fact, because the filter mostly just obscured the taste and the lessened the buzz, most companies started using stronger tobaccos to make up for it that had more nicotine.

So filtered cigarettes were actually less healthy in most cases. All sorts of shit. They were also more, even though the cotton filters that were way cheaper than the actual tobacco, they were displacing in the cigarettes. It's like with every new sentence, the cigarette industry executives become more and more like a small, dark ball of unspeakable even before. It really the way through the essay, man. Right. The back of companies start putting out pure cyanide cigarettes. Okay. Too far, bringing it back a notch.

But just one notch, Bill. No, look at the additives in a minute. Yeah. Well, you know what I think you're overlooking is that the filters gave smokers something to dismissively litter in filthy perfusion on every possible city surface for generation after generation. So they were already, yeah, I mean, they were already doing that with the butts to begin with. But yeah, they were bigger and took longer to biodegrade. So of course, there's

way more wrong with smoking than smokers cough, but the link between cigarettes and lung cancer took a notoriously long time to establish. And yes, a lot of that was because tobacco companies were out there mudding the water with shit studies and gazillion dollar incentives to equivocate, but that isn't the whole story. Okay, so first of all, it takes a long fucking time of smoking to get lung cancer, right? The rise in lung cancer rates lagged behind the rise in smoking by about 20 years.

And a lot of people who smoked never got it. So the link isn't as obvious as you think. Plus, we're talking about a rise in lung cancer that started in the 1940s. And it's not like tobacco smoke was the only potentially carcinogenic and new pollutant showing up in the lives of the average American of the time. Honey, the baby's sippy cup is empty. Can you fill it up with lead-based paint when you get up? Right, yeah.

Sure thing, dear. Oh, and have a great day at the radioactive watch face painting company. Okay, maybe it's just me living in the like host, COVID, hellscape, but maybe we don't wait for the nerds to finish their study before we stop doing bad things or start doing good things, right? Like, maybe they can't jump to us with their well-reviewed paper. Like, I'm just thinking out loud here. I'm just thinking out loud.

Yeah, the same way that Gwyneth Paltrow and all those dudes burning down to five G-Selt towers are like, yeah, there's dangerous going that direction too. I can't hear it. Of course, you might be thinking, okay, yeah, there are plenty of confounding variables that could also cause lung cancer, but surely somebody noticed that the people getting it were all smokers, right? But that ignores two important factors. The first is the ubiquity of smoking, but the second and perhaps even more confounding

was second hand smoke, right? So a huge number of the people getting lung cancer from cigarettes weren't smokers and since certain professions put people in contact with second hand smoke more often than others, researchers often focused on the specific pollutants that we associate with those professions. Like, for example, a rise in lung cancer among flight attendants was way more likely to get scientists to think of, say, exposure to jet fuel than exposure to cigarette smoke. Or like cancer is caused by your proximity to individually wrapped pretzel sticks.

Right. Exactly. That won't unprick wrap. Yeah. To be fair, if watching someone try to fit a bag in the overhead that very obviously is not going to fit like six times a day every day. Doesn't give you a brain tumor. Nothing gives you a brain tumor.

Okay, yeah. That's literally the only thing that makes them smile. They just smile ear to ear when they see you, you'll not figure it out. No, no, give it, turn it around. If you tell, yeah, try it again. Yeah, try it again. So another roadblock to accepting the dangers of smoking is worth mentioning too, because

it was so fucking addictive, governments could tax tobacco at a way higher rate than most consumer products before it affected consumption. So there was a lot of pressure on governments to ignore the dangers as well. All that being said, the bazillion dollar tobacco industries obfuscation was definitely the lion share of the problem here. To give you an idea just how pervasive that industry's image control arm was and still is, I should point out that the Wikipedia subheading about health concerns on the history of tobacco article today in 2022 is quote, Nazi Germany saw the first modern anti-smoking campaign.

I can't help but feel like we have some Philip Morris employee to thank for that one, right? But yeah, the link between lung cancer and tobacco use was first identified in Germany in the 1940s. And the Nazis were the first European government to really crack down on its use. Yeah, okay. The cigarettes are verboten, but we're sticking to a healthy, aryan diet of tinned meat and meth. Right.

Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Now, of course, researchers at the UK and the US were seeing the same things at the same time as the German doctors, but they had a lot more of their economy invested in not noticing it, so they didn't. In fact, in 1948, a British physiologist named Richard Dawle published the first major scientific study that proved smoking caused serious health damage, but it was largely ignored.

In 1950, he published another study in the British Medical Journal that showed a clear link between smoking and lung cancer, but it wasn't until the 1960s that the US UK government started to begrudgingly admit that smoking was bad for you and it would be at least another 20 years and by some measures another 40 before they admitted just how bad they were for you. Right. And like not to put too fine a point on it, but they still haven't fully admitted how bad it is for you,

because you can still fucking buy him at 7.11, right? You can't buy a pack of Bob's drinking bleach. No, you can buy bleach. I mean, we still have guns that we sell. That's true. Now in the United States at least, right? Smoking peaked in the 1960s. Apparently once people were armed with honest information

about how bad the shit was for you, they did it less and less. Tobacco companies continue to do everything possible to reverse that trend, of course, but eventually they had to try to make it look like they weren't, which is how you wound up with cigarette companies adding shit to tobacco to make it ever more addictive without telling anyone. Now, lawsuits and shit have reduced that practice, but to this day tobacco companies add ammonia salt to cigarettes, which are there because they convert bound nicotine molecules in tobacco smoke to free nicotine molecules.

Now the companies insist that that doesn't affect the absorption rate of the nicotine, but the common term for doing that, for converting the bound molecules into free ones is free basing. Oh, God. That's what that word means. And I feel like tobacco companies telling you that free basing isn't more addictive as the kind of news. That's the information that you can just ignore without a solid reputation. Unfortunately, though, the FDA disagrees with me on this.

I'm sorry, Mr. Luzans, but the FDA representative needs to beat you to death with this canvas bag and blazing with a dollar sign. Yeah. Okay, but at least now I know I can get a bent spoonful of camel goo with these $3 in camel passion. I was wondering, hey, look, we're not adding the ammonia salts because they make cigarettes more addictive. We are doing it because of the well-known beloved taste and smell of ammonia. That's right.

I'm gonna fit it in the doubt, guys. Right. Steel man, the argument's damn it. It's been to a synabun. I pee on my own cigarettes before I smoke. All right. So, but despite the tobacco companies' best efforts, the popularity of cigarette smoking has been declining

in the US for more than a half century. Now, there's a lot of factors at play here. We have better access to information, higher taxes on tobacco products, better and more accessible smoking cessation technologies. But from everything I could see, the most important and most effective thing that we've done has been the coordinated effort to remove the cool aspect from cigarettes. Okay, like when Hollywood movies stopped making all the cool people smoke, kids picked up

the habit at a way lower rate. But I mean, it's expensive and makes you smell bad. It tastes like acid. It doesn't really get you high. So it's not like kids needed a hell of a lot of incentive not to pick up that habit. Okay. Sigarettes taste like ass and smoking is down. But analingis is on the rise. Which does suggest that maybe next time someone is tongue deep in your ass, you have the decline of smoking to think for it. There you go.

Okay. I'm gonna take an ass eating break at work. You go, I'm sorry. I'm on my 15. I got an eating ass. You walk out of work. They're all eating each other's ass. Why did they get to do this.

No, of course, all of that progress has been threatened, at least to some degree, by the rise of electronic cigarettes, which allowed tobacco companies to once again, hide behind bullshit excuses like the long-term effects of e-cigarette uses, still unknown. And yeah, I mean, that's technically true, but I feel like we can say pretty definitively that it's not good for you.

But despite all this shit we know on the subject according to the latest numbers I can find, about 9% of Americans regularly use e-cigarettes and that includes better than one in four high school kids. I honestly, I have to give the other side here, it is just water vapor, sorry. Oh, it's actually, sorry, it's not water vapor. It's nope.

It's the vapor of unregulated oil which you don't need to test to sell and you're not obligated to tell customers what it's made of. You know what, never mind. I had a thing when I was in the middle of some right. Some of it smells like bubble gum. Yeah, well, yep, right. And just play for that way.

Yeah. And look, I know we do a comedy show at all, but I want to close on a personal note here because I smoked for about 30 years. And by the time this episode comes out, I will be 916 days away from my last cigarette. And yes, it is really fucking hard to quit. It's as hard as they say it is.

But I have so little self-control that I plot revenge on street signs. He does, I can't put that in. Okay, if I can quit, you can quit. There are more ex-smokers in the world than current smokers, right? There's a ton of online support. It is relatively easy to get smoking cessation devices

like patches and gums for free. And they really make a world of difference. I am the world's fourth least optimistic person. And even I think you can do it. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? In the 18th century tobacco enemas were a common treatment to try to revive people who drowned. So I'm sorry, they didn't fit anywhere else in the essay as citation needed tag or no, I had to share that with you. Thank you.

Yes, absolutely. And are you ready for the quiz? I'm ready to smoke this fucking quiz. All right, Noah. Tobacco companies came up with some truly bizarre slogans. Which of these is not a real slogan for a cigarette company? Oh, good one. Okay. Hey, not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking camels.

Be straight up. Seriously, straight up. See, thank you for smoking. Nice. Oh, wow. Of all cigarettes, only players please so much. Ooh. E, good things are always basic.

Or F, I pity the fool who doesn't smoke Winston's. Oh, wow. Ah, you know what? I'm tempted to say F because no one alvers Moe to Winston's except my dad, but I think Winston's too. Oh, really? Yeah, right on the dance mode.

Secret answer G, those are all real slow. I made up F is not. Oh, okay. Well, then I say F because I have to win this for the stomach. You got it. When you didn't, when you got it, when you, you got it.

That's right. All right, Noah, it's obvious that everyone who smokes is an idiot and none of us would ever make such an irresponsible health choice. Hey, microplastic. Be global warming. See monkey bucks. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh but I still believe it's true today. I literally today was like, I should eat some Oreos today. I want to be method about this. I want to sell this shit. Yeah, but all right. No, we learned about the chocolate cake crumb coated with tobacco, a black lung cake. What is another popular after dinner cigarette dessert?

A, parlaments, pee, moral brioche, pee, doesn't know, sugar and spice Roy's, pee, Phillips Morris, or pee. Be adventurous and order off the menu port. That's what it does away. That one doesn't work. I know that Phillips some more. It's so good. Yeah, I was going to say the only thing on there that's actually grosser than cigarettes

than eating cigarettes is eating smores. So I'm going to go with the Phillips smores. Oh, I'm sorry it was Marlbrio. Oh, that was pretty good. Oh, yeah. It was pretty good. Yeah, shot it s'mores to end the episode, man. Well, Cecil wins. All right, well next ass ass will be Tom.

Yeah. All right, well for Tom, Cecil and Noah, I'm Eli Bosnick. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, Tom will be an expert on something else. Straight down then you can listen to Noah myself on the scathing atheists, god awful movies, D&D Minus, and the Skeptocrat. Or you could take a long, smooth, toad of Tom and Cecil over at cognitive dissonance. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at

patreon.com slash citation pod. Or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, pick out past episodes, connect us on social media, or check the show notes, be sure to check out citationpod.com. Sir, sir! Yes, Jenkins, what is it? I saw the stable master attacking your wife, sir. He did? Yes, sir. He must have grabbed a salami from the kitchen and he was stabbing her in the tummy.

It was some more white. She was making a heck of a racket there. I see, I see. Did you throw a bucket of water on them? I did, sir. Made a sausage disappear like magic. Well done, Jenkins. Well done.

Thank you, sir. I see, I see, did you throw a bucket of water on them? Oh, I did, sir. Made a sausage disappear like magic. Well done, Jenkins. Well done. Thank you, sir.