Comment on Tobacco conference to weigh up stubbing out cigarette butts
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 3 days ago
Furthermore, plastic filters “don’t provide any meaningful increase in the safety of cigarettes”, he said.
Interesting. I’ll have to read up on that, seems rather counterintuitive.
I recall hearing in a documentary that filters were just yet another PR scheme by Big Tobacco to make smoking more appealing when studies started to show up about the health effects of cigarettes.
I don’t have a source in mind so don’t quote me on this, but I even seem to remember that those filters are designed to take a yellow/brownish colour when you smoke to make it look like they filter out all the nasty stuff that would otherwise end up in your body
A PR scheme doesn’t necessarily have to be completely fake, though. If a cigarette filter does reduce the harmfulness somewhat, it’s still better than not using one (if you dispose of it properly), but tobacco companies can still spin it like it’s basically not harmful at all with a filter.
naeap@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I roll my own, but my filters are made of recycled paper
It’s popular, because you don’t suck in pieces of tobacco
ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 3 days ago
They do actually serve the purpose of catching a lot of tar, not just tobacco itself. Which I would assume does have some positive impact for the smoker not getting as much tar through to their body. Although its obviously a negligible benefit in comparison to just not smoking, but that seems reductive. Just like how they talk about ecigs. Harm reduction is a pretty valuable perspective, but for some reason people only view tobacco products from an “abstinence or bust” standpoint.
In the pre-filter days, when people used those long Pink Panther style cigarette holders, a lot of the holders were designed to fit another cigarette inside of it. The second cigarette acted as a kind of tar filter for the cigarette being smoked. When I was young I bought an old cigarette holder at an antique mall and it still had a cigarette inside it from who knows how many decades prior