When you smoke a cigarette, it doesn’t just disappear into thin air. Each cigarette you smoke leaves behind residue. This cigarette residue gets into curtains, walls, clothing, and lots of other different places. Wouldn’t you like to know just what is contained inside this cigarette residue that you and your loved ones are unknowingly inhaling into your bodies?
Here are just some of the chemicals contained in the residue that cigarettes leave behind, and what they do:
Arsenic
Arsenic is a chemical substance we usually associate with rat poison. It was also often used in the past to poison people. Famous victims of arsenic include Napoleon, King George III of England, and Huo Yuan Jia (the main character in Jet Li’s Fearless).
Butane
Butane is commonly found in lighter fluid. Continued exposure to butane can cause breathing and respiratory problems.
Carbon Monoxide
At low levels, carbon monoxide may give you a headache or make you dizzy. Higher levels of carbon monoxide poisoning can make part of your blood unable to deliver oxygen properly, and can lead to death.
Hydrogen Cyanide
A colorless gas that is released when you burn things like cigarettes and plastic. It messes with your body cells’ ability to use oxygen, causing them to die.
Lead
Lead is poisonous metal that, when released into the air and inhaled or somehow taken into the body, quickly spreads through the body and causes problems with important parts of your body like your nervous system, your blood and heart, your kidneys, and your immune system.
Polonium-210
This is a radioactive substance that is found in cigarettes and therefore cigarette residue. That’s right, cigarettes are radioactive. They don’t just make you cough and get lung cancer, apparently if you smoke long enough you just might find yourself glowing. Polonium-210 was also an important part of the Manhattan project’s efforts to create an atomic bomb.
Toluene
A chemical often used for adding to gasoline to make benzene, also found in paint thinners. Toluene messes with your central nervous system. In lower doses it can give you headaches, make you dizzy, tired, and nauseous. In higher doses it can also make you depressed.
Still feel like smoking?
4 Responses to “What Is In Cigarette Residue?”
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