Pathologists don't fully understand how drugs are absorbed into hair, and nobody has even tried to determine if ancient hair can do so. If it can, perhaps these results can best be explained by someone doing cocaine in the Munich Museum mummy room. Balabanova's nicotine results may not be so amenable to simple explanation. The levels she has found range from nothing up to the lowest levels accepted as proof of smoking in modern hair. Most of her results are typical of environmental exposure.
Small amounts build up in the body just through diet and are detectable using the standard tests.
The mummies with the highest levels, however, are difficult to explain environmentally. A study done by a team led by Helen Dimich-Ward in Vancouver, Canada showed comprable levels only in people who were exposed to heavy second hand smoke in their workplaces. Also, the majority of food plants containing nicotine are New World plants inaccessible to the ancient Egyptians. Other tests Balabanova performed further complicate the picture. She tested a number of modern smokers, killed in car crashes, and compared the relative levels of nicotine in their hair and bones with the same tests done on her mummies.