I know it's very, very hard to stop smoking. But I've got to say I hope you will. The harmfulness of cigarettes is not due to dangerous additives. Tobacco contains nicotine, a highly addictive drug, in addition to a host of carcinogenic substances, some present in the unburned leaf, others formed during combustion. Smoking is responsible for an estimated 40 percent of cancers in the United States.
Tobacco also is linked to heart problems, respiratory disease and urinary problems.
Smoking the purest, most natural tobacco raises your risks of all those diseases. All that said, I do think you're better off with plain old tobacco if you're going to smoke. A typical tobacco cigarette has hundreds of additives, and some of them may be also be quite bad for your health. If you'd like to see how the tobacco industry has long known about the addictiveness of nicotine and its harm to health, check out secret research memos and internal documents collected and publicized by Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. You can read original memos showing how much companies paid to have stars puff away in movies, and how they tried to manipulate scientific research to their benefit.