Have you ever looked inside an unsmoked cigarette?
Yesterday, after lighting a Marlboro cigarette, my wife said, “I smell paper burning”. We both searched around and found nothing. She then located the source of the smell. It was my Marlboro cigarette. Being a suspicious person, I gently unrolled the contents from a new Marlboro cigarette, in order to examine its contents. I discovered some light brown colored specs, which appeared to be brown confetti paper. Not having a microscope has hindered me in my investigation of “fillers” for Marlboro cigarettes. I suspect the burning paper, my wife was smelling, was the brown confetti paper specs in my Marlboro cigarette. Question: have you ever been suspicious of the contents in your cigarettes? We all know about the chemicals, but do cigarettes now contain brown confetti papers as “fillers”? Please check one out for yourself and see what you find and advise us.
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11 Answers
I would check for you, but I honestly can’t bring myself to do it. Those suckers are expensive! If I accidentally break one, though, I’ll look inside for you.
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lol….You wouldn’t believe what I’ve found in and “coating” they put on cigarettes….
I wonder if the filler confetti is as harmful to your health as the genuine addictiveness-enhanced tobacco mixture.
Not that it would make it okay if they’re less so. You have a right to all the poison you’ve paid for.
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I imagine a bit of paper is the least concerning thing in the things.
Here is a list of the 599 allowed additives to cigarettes. I got tired of searching for brown paper but I assume it is the vector for other chemicals.
Additives or addictives? The hardest thing I’ve ever done is successfully quit smoking, and it’s still a work in progress.
Sounds like it’s time to start rolling your own. I think Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard was thinking of growing tobacco, maybe he could hook you up.
I smoke djarum blacks. Ive emptied the contents of them on various occasions. Aint nothin but tobacco and cloves in there.
Marlboro cigarettes do contain paper in a manner of speaking, and Philip Morris makes no secret of it. The “paper” is officially called “Reconstituted Sheet Tobacco”; it’s officially used as a way to reclaim tobacco dust, scrap, stems, and the like that would otherwise have to be discarded. Critics have claimed that the real purpose of RST is to pack more high-pH nicotine (i.e., “freebase nicotine”) into cigarettes, making them more addictive by providing a bigger, faster nicotine wallop. RST is made by grinding up the waste tobacco and mixing it with water to form a slurry. The slurry is then subjected to a process exactly like paper making. The resulting tobacco-paper is generally pale brown to very pale beige in color because stems and other waste materials used to make it are light in color as well. The paper is then sprayed with a flavoring and moistening mixture (this is when the alleged nicotine spiking occurs) and sliced into pieces of the size and shape desired to help keep the whole column of tobacco securely in the paper shaft of the cigarette. RST is added to cut-from-whole-leaf tobacco in specified quantities depending on the brand.
Whether this contributes to any “paper” smell that your wife experienced I can’t say, but it is almost certainly what you saw when you examined the tobacco in one of your cigarettes. I have to say that personally I’ve always found the smell of a burning Marlboro to be very distinct from any other brand, and very pleasant, actually. And that was true both before I became a smoker and after, and despite the fact that I usually smoke Camel.
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