Humans have cultivated the tobacco plant for thousands of years. One of the most profitable crops to grow & grown all around the world. A tax revenue stream that funds governments worldwide. In the pipe, smokeless, vaporizer pens, cigarettes, tobacco the biggest non food crop grown.
Let's clear something up other than the air of secondhand smoke to start with. Tobacco is not nicotine any more than coffee is caffeine or cannabis is THC. Western scientific thinking causes a bias towards looking at any complex biological plant that has mental effects on human consumers in terms of the most active component or compound present in the plant. I call this "pharmacological focus" a perspective that has origins in medicine & the treatment of patients with small molecule drugs with good efficacy that are biologically active, like metformin or ibuprofen as examples.
Tobacco Cultivation
Traditional tobacco made of a mixture of burly & flue cured tobacco leaves, as in high quality cigars made this way. Cigarettes are a complicated highly processed product by comparison. There is an excellent YouTube video in Season 5 of "So Expensive" by business insider & a similar Modern Marvel video about Tobacco that will educated you all about tobacco as a topic. The wikipedia entries in tobacco & nicotine are similarly illuminating.
Cigarettes Highly Processed
Cigarettes are not just tobacco leaves in a paper tube. They are typically made of expanded tobacco processed with CO2 to puff up the leaves. RECON a complex product made of old cigarettes, & tobacco floor dust from the factories, & a mother liquor enhanced with food ingredients & chemical additives to convert nicotine into its freebase form to make it hit faster when this mixture smoked & such that it can leave the body faster, making it more addictive, the way that crack as the free base form more addictive than cocaine its chloride salt.
Complicated Tobacco Smoke
Nicotine & thousands of other compounds in tobacco smoke are absorbed into the body via the mouth & bronchial tubes & gas exchange sacs in the lungs. Smoking the most addictive way as the heat from combustion boils off the nicotine in a heat of combustion driven distillation that also releases tar & other carcinogenic heavy metal oxides in the tar, like arsenic & cadmium, that are responsible for the main negative health effects of smoking tobacco.
Inhaling Cigarette Smoke Harder
When people smoke cigarettes, they deliberately suck harder & inhale the smoke, pulling not just puffing & that draws the smoke & its toxic constituents deep into the lung tissue where the bad parts cause the same health problems that carbon energy combustion air pollution causes via inhalation exposure. The Surgeon General of the USA says that tobacco the only product that when used as directed kills its used, with slow cumulative effects over time with repeated use, in large part driven by the addictive nature of free base modified nicotine in modern filtered cigarettes.
Tobacco History
Tobacco has a deep history in global trade going back thousands of years. In South America tobacco was used in a variety of different ways, sniffed, smoked, smeared it on their bodies, drank it in a paste & used it as an enema. Local shamans would use enough nicotine to get them near the edge of death so that they could "gain understanding" of the health problems of their patients.
Tobacco was first cultivated in the Andes between 5000 & 3000 BC. When Columbus sent explores to study the South American tribes, the found the locals were smoking large cigars. Spanish & Portuguese sailors brought tobacco back to Europe where tobacco smoking became popular. When the British visited North America they picked up the smoking habit & brought it back to London where it became popular with the high class.
In the 1500's beggars in Seville collected discarded cigar butts, shredded them to roll these scraps into paper for smoking, thereby improvising the first cigarettes. Poor man’s smokes were known as little cigars. In the 1700's cigarettes spread to Italy & Portugal; Portuguese traders took them to the Levant & Russia. French & British troops in the Napoleonic Wars became familiar & the French named them cigarettes. Later French and British troops fighting in the Crimean War became aquatinted with Turkish cigarettes. Cigarettes were gaining popularity in the United States as British taste later migrated to cigarettes filled with straight Virginia tobacco, as the U.S. developed a taste for blended tobacco made from burly & flue cured tobacco.
Improvements in tobacco cultivation & processing lowered the acid content of cigarette tobacco, making it easier to inhale, radically improving smoking rates during the early 1900's. During World War I smoking became socially acceptable to women worldwide. After WWII, scientific research on tobacco smokes effect on human health started producing medical evidence that cigarette smoking increased risks for emphysemic, lung cancer & heart disease. Government warnings & other social outreach efforts to curb smoking rates we introduced in the UK & USA, causing smoking rates to decrease. In developing nations, smoking gained popularity & today most smokers live in less developed countries. In America, the wealthiest 5% & poorest 5% are the demographic groups that use tobacco products the most, mostly cigarettes & cigars. During the 1980, ammonia chemical manipulation was developed to make cigarettes more addictive. New bigger filters & lower nicotine content cigarettes meant that smokers had to smoke more cigarette for the same effect they got from fewer older stronger natural cigarettes.Tobacco Financed the Formation of America
America's initial colonies were exporting more than 20 million tons of tobacco back to Britain every year. Tobacco was currency, the dollar or euro, used to pay for slaves, materials, government, marketing. Colonial tobacco farmers like Thomas Jefferson & George Washington. The American Revolution was known as the Tobacco War. In 1776 Benjamin Franklin used 5 million pounds of tobacco to collateralize a loan from France to finance the War of Independence.
Globalization of Tobacco
From Europe, tobacco spread to the east, through centra & easter Europe, into Russia & Mongolia, down to China & further to southern asian countries. Today over 1 billion people smoke tobacco worldwide. Smokers are chasing that buzz, that hit, that high, that legal taxed drug euphoria thats short lived that produces joy & satisfaction, pleasurable feelings that have a sinister side effect. Sadly, like engine exhaust, tobacco smoke contains toxic undesirable components that harm the user & other people. Ethanol in Alcoholic beverages produced more harm & violence & accidents, but tobacco smoke harms its user & others with secondhand smoke, because the smoke contains heavy metals like lead & polonium, that cause lung cancers even in tiny amounts.
Smoking Not Trending Anymore
In America & other wealthy nations, smoking less popular now, as most working & middle class people having kicked the habit years ago, well informed by the long term negative side effects of smoking that go way beyond yellow teeth & foul breath to mouth & throat cancers & lung cancers & other respiratory diseases like chronic bronchitis & COPD & emphysema! Most places & many locals banned indoor smoking years ago & impose a 25 ft setback rule. Where I work, none one allowed to smoke or use tobacco products on School District Property. They claim its a drug free zone but actively promote, endorse & subsidize through different means, coffee & thus caffeine the drug consumption.
Tobacco Taxes
Taxes on cigarettes drove prices for a 20 unit pack from $1.49 to $12 or more. Some high quality rare cigars sell for $20 or more individually. Beer, Coffee, Tobacco & Wine are as American as an Apple Pie or Turkey dinner on Thanksgiving, a hamburger or hotdog; iconic features of American culture. Tobacco taxes pay billions of dollars to each US state to subsidize healthcare costs in those states from diseases caused by tobacco smoking. Tobacco taxes have financed trade, wars, colonization & all sorts of other business activities. Know as "sin" taxes, also applied to the retail sale of alcoholic beverages, spirits & liquor.
Seeking Euphoria
People using tobacco & alcohol are seeking a euphoria experience of enhanced joy & pleasure, the same kind of hit you get when you have to poop really bad & finally get to a toilet or latrine & go #2 & get that endorphin rush. The same kind of hit that people get when exercising hard & getting a "runners high". The same kind of "relief pleasure hit you get when you have to pee really bad & finally go pee.
Getting High Naturally on Brain Chemicals
People get a high when they are really tired & lye down to go to bed, during the transition from wakefulness to sleep, its people getting high on their own brain supply of drugs, especially so when they are asleep dreaming *psychedelic for sure* / dreams on seem weird when you wake up & realize that you were asleep dreaming. Your brain does magical stuff when you're dreaming, asleep. Your brain attempts to visualize a narrative to make sense of as its background processes automatically sort & organize memories, what to delete or store. All mammals sleep as its a highly conserved behavior in nature.
Low Dose Nicotine a Stimulant
If you use nicotine near bedtime, you might notice its a stimulate in small doses, as it can disrupt your ability to fall asleep or stay asleep or cause choppy sleep. Higher doses of nicotine have a sedating effect, especially when smoked because the CO carbon monoxide formed from the incomplete (rich fuel air mix) combustion of tobacco - if pure oxygen introduced to the cigarette during its combustion & if it was made of just natural tobacco with no additives, the resulting smoke would be slightly less toxic & slightly less intoxicating.
Humans Getting High For Thousands of Years
Humans have been using & continue using drugs, for nearly all of human history. People enjoy getting chemically induced Euphoria from drinking coffee or alcohol, or from smoking tobacco or marijuana. When used vaporize meth crystals or snort cocaine or smoke crack, they are looking for that high. When people shoot heroin, or take opioid pills, they are chasing a high, looking for that high. Tolerance increases & then more of the drug required to get the same high, then the side effects of the higher doses increase. A toxic negative feedback formed with drug abuse, regardless if the drugs were legal or not. Some prescription drugs are more toxic than some illicit street drugs.
Lifestyle vs Habits
Do not judge other people friends, we are all in this life together. When people smoke, sometimes they are doing it to cope with stress & depression; the same reason that some people use sugary foods in abusive ways, they are self medicating with socially acceptable drugs, sugar, coffee, tea, alcohol, & tobacco, though Tobacco & Alcohol & Sugar are developing a stigma or taboo because of the negative health effects of regular consumption.
Repeated consumption & larger doses increase harm to the user, in the case of sugar & veggies oils, obesity & metabolic syndrome diseases & disorders, with alcohol similar & with tobacco smoke lung problems & cancers. Sugars when abused can fuel cancer cells. Highly processed veggie oils are already rancid when you buy them & had to be deodorized during their high temperature processing stages.
Fragile monounsaturated oils like olive oil or those in olives or coconut oil or butter, those are less dangerous, especially less dangerous than the Trans Fats in Crisco or Hydrogenated Cotton Seed Oil // cotton crops are sprayed with more pesticides than most other crops, making Crisco a source of nasty toxic chemicals in addition to the cardio-toxic trans fats.
Uplifting Other People
No one lives forever, no one has all the answers, life is temporary, try to make the best of it, be wise & try not to be foolish or make bad choices. Try to be a good person & work well with other people since we are all in this life together as human people on Earth & must call on each other to take better care of nature, come up with healthier smarter ways to live & help people to kick drug abuse & unhealthy food habits!
Learn More About Tobacco in this YouTube Video https://youtu.be/gdV_1u-TodY
Freebase Nicotine via Ammonia Nicotine Manipulation
In terms of chemically modifying tobacco during cigarette manufacturing, the main aim of big tobacco companies called "ammonia chemistry" where different kind of chemical ammonia additives like diammonium phosphate, urea, & ammonium hydroxide are chemically reacted in the mother liquor tank, a large water based (aqueous) solute mixture extracted from the reclaim & recon, so as to add components that facilitate the conversion of nicotine salt into freebase forms that are more addictive (faster into the body & faster out of the body) Other additives like glycerol, chocolate, butter fat & emollients are added to reduce the harshness of the smoke & to add sugar forming components that make the smoke sweeter tasting & less bitter, to improve the user experience, flavor & taste. The mother liquor & recon are used for Nicotine Manipulation. A cigarette without additives produces a harsh smoke, so the aim of improving the smoke to make it more mellow or lighter & & smoother or easier to smoke.
Cigarette Mixture Processing
Once reacted, the mother liquor then sprayed on a special paper made from ground up tobacco stems, offal & reclaim (old cigarettes)(tobacco scraps, off cuts & other parts), that are steam pressure rolled into a paper tissue paper like material that soaks up the mother liquor sprayed onto it. This then put through an extrusion press with rotary cutter that produces small 20/8ths of an inch strips that are then blended with expanded tobacco & regular cigarette tobacco to make the mixture thats continually fed into a cigarette producing machine where the filters & paper & tobacco mix are combined into finished cigarettes made at a clip of thousands of units per minute. Trillions of cigarettes are smoked by billions of people all around the world!
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