Despite decades of debate, denial, and dubious behavior on the part of the tobacco industry
regarding the potential dangers of cigarettes, it’s now generally agreed upon that smoking
is bad for your health. Smoking damages nearly every organ in the body, causing strokes,
coronary heart disease, respiratory diseases, a whole slew of cancers, and other deleterious
effects. And while big tobacco has done its best to feign ignorance since the
40’s, we now know the answer to “Is smoking bad for you?” is a resounding yes. But a
less-hotly debated question remains: is smoking vegan?
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. While being vegan
is often associated with a level of health fanaticism approaching daily wheatgrass juice
enemas and coffee colonics, the truth is, not everyone goes vegan for their health.
There are junk food vegans, vegans who drink alcohol, and yes, even vegans who smoke. And
I mean tobacco, not the other thing everyone assumes all vegans smoke…
But can cigarettes be considered vegan? As usual, the answer to this question is more
complex than it would first appear. I’m going to touch on the various areas of concern,
but please refer to the blog post for this video for citations and more detailed information.
The main areas of concern we’ll be addressing are: animal ingredients in cigarettes,
animals killed in the farming process, animal testing, the environmental impact, second
hand smoke and companion animals child labor and worker toxicity exposure and of
course a nod to health
The most basic measure of whether something is vegan or not is whether it contains animals
or their byproducts. When we combine the myriad of ways we disguise animal byproducts with
the close to 600 ingredients found in cigarettes, including arsenic, formaldehyde, lead, ammonia,
acetone and other far less-pronounceable elements, it becomes rather difficult to ascertain if
anything is animal-derived.
This issue was brought to a very public head back in 2010 when a press release, light on
the facts but big on the sensation, claimed that cigarettes may contain pig’s blood.
This revelation came from artist Christien Meindertsma’s three-year-long project entitled
Pig 05049, which tracked and documented all of the ways one pig’s body was used post-slaughter,
including in cigarette filters.
Anti-smoking advocate Professor Simon Chapman of the University of Sydney saw this as an
opportunity to use public outrage, particularly among Jewish, Muslim, vegetarian and vegan
populations, to bring to light “concerns that ingredients such as additives or processing
aids used in tobacco products are virtually unregulated and non-transparent.”
After creating the press release, the story went viral and built into quite a frenzy,
with Iranian officials calling it a Zionist conspiracy and tobacco companies churning
out denials left and right. The truth of the matter is far less titalating. In 1997 a Greek
tobacco company set out to create a healthier cigarette, using pig’s blood in the filter
to mitigate toxins. The resulting BioFilter led the company to second place in the Greek
tobacco industry, though every scientific study to evaluate these claims found them
to be patently false, and in 2002 Greece finally outlawed their “healthier
smoking” claims. As far as I can tell, the filters are still on the market and I have
link on the blog post to the company’s website with more information.
There are also at least two other animal-derived ingredients in cigarettes, which are far more
regularly employed: beeswax and castoreum. Beeswax is rather self-explanatory and you
can see my video here on the vegan-ness of bee products for more information. Castoreum,
used in cigarettes to lend a sweet, smoky flavor, is another matter entirely.
I covered the glories of castoruem in one of my very first vegan nuggets ever on What’s
Really In Your Food, back when both my editing skills and language were a little less polished.
“If all of that isn’t enough for you, have you ever wondered where artificial raspberry,
vanilla or strawberry flavors come from? Castoreum! - An extract made from dried, ground up sacs
located by the anal glands of beavers.
Yes, we are talking about pouches in the *ss of a beaver. It can be added to foods such
as gums, alcohol, candy and baked goods. Perhaps tossing a beaver’s salad does give you a
nice little vanilla flavor but does that really make it right?”
[I’ve come a long way…]
Castoreum is harvested by killing beavers and cutting out their castor glands, making
it a most definitively un-vegan ingredient.
So when it comes to animals in your smokes, bees and beaver butts are more likely than
pigs blood, but just as un-vegan.
Now I’ll just speak very briefly to the concern of animals killed during tobacco farming
and harvesting. While we should strive for pesticide-free, sustainable farming,
with any crop, field animals are going to be unintentionally harmed and killed in the
farming and harvesting process. We have to eat but we don’t have to smoke, so the animals
killed by tobacco farming are entirely avoidable deaths.
And now, to the heavy-hitter of the vegan cigarette debate: animal testing. I have a
four-part video series on animal testing which goes into greater detail about the inefficacy
of animal tests, why we are still conducting them, how they endanger and even kill humans,
and what viable alternatives exist, which I’ve linked up here and below if you want
to delve deeper into this matter.
Perhaps the most insane aspect of animal testing as a whole is its complete and utter lack
of credible results. It’s no secret that our bodies differ greatly from other species,
and so, it follows, would our reactions to stimuli and toxins.
In regards to tobacco specifically, Dr. C Ray Greek of Americans for Medical Advancement
states that “Animal experiments failed notoriously to demonstrate a smoking-cancer connection
for over half a century...If the greatest killer of our time was promoted by physicians
based on animal experiments, there is obviously something terminally wrong with the system."
A 2015 paper drawing on more than 50 recent toxicology studies, demonstrated the superiority
of widely available modern, non-animal models over inaccurate animal tests for measuring
the toxicity of tobacco products. In 2012, the U.S. Congress even stated that “there
is significant scientific evidence that animals are poor models for the testing of tobacco
products used by humans.”
Unlike all medications, tobacco products are not required to undergo animal testing. The
UK, Germany, Belgium and other countries even banned their usage and Canada requires only
in vitro studies, meaning on a cellular level rather than on whole living animals.
Even the tobacco industry’s own studies have concluded that “in vitro toxicology
tests can be successfully used both for better understanding the biological activity of cigarette
smoke … and for guiding the development of cigarettes with reduced toxicity.”
Despite this fact, tobacco companies, government agencies, the American Cancer Society, National
Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, among other organization and, yes, even anti-smoking groups
continue to test cigarettes on animals.
On this video’s blog post I have links to several articles and studies which catalogue,
describe, and demonstrate the myriad of horrifying animal tobacco tests,
but I’m going to just share a few of them with you.
Perhaps the most visually shocking type of tobacco testing are the direct smoking tests,
made famous in 1975 by undercover Sunday People reporter Mary Beith in her expose known as
“The Smoking Beagles.” Beith got a position in an Imperial Chemical Industries laboratory
where 48 beagles were restrained with straightjackets, placed into what Beith described as “medieval
stocks” and fitted with tubed masks which forcibly pumped cigarette smoke into their
lungs day in and day out for up to three years for some of the dogs. Beith reported that,
“when they have finished their smoking stint the dogs are killed and sent to pathology
laboratories to be cut up and examined for signs of cancer, liver or heart diseases or
other possible effects. Some of the dogs have acquired a smoker’s cough judging from the
sounds I heard.”
The images Beith captured sparked global outrage, yet only two of the 48 beagles were rescued
in a technically illegal act of liberation by activist Mike Huskisson and an unnamed
partner in the early days of the Animal Liberation Front.
While not garnering the same level of disgust from the public, direct smoking tests on mice
and rats are just as horrifying. Their entire bodies are crammed into tiny canisters that
pump smoke directly into their noses for six or more hours a day up to two years.
Direct smoking tests can also involve tracheotomies. In a 2001 study at the Oregon National Primate
Research Center involving sixty-seven pregnant Rhesus macaque monkeys, half of the monkeys
had tubes surgically implanted in order to subject them to a continuous flow of nicotine
for the last four months of their pregnancies. Five days before the mothers reached full
term, the experimenters cut out, killed and dissected the fetuses of all 67 mothers.
These kind of experiments are still being carried out on mice, rats, beagles, monkeys,
apes, and other sentient beings.They are not required by law,
have no scientific validity and they even endanger humans with the cross-species application
of their results, and are all for a product that is not only completely unnecessary but
also deadly to consumers and damaging to the environment.
Speaking to the environmental impact of smoking, around 5.6 trillion cigarette butts are dumped
into the environment every year. When these butts land in water or on the soil, all of
the chemicals and carcinogenic ingredients we discussed creates leachates, a toxic soup
that poisons fish and other wildlife.
Of course smoking also affects one’s home environment as well. A series of studies at
Tufts University and Colorado State University found that second hand smoke is just as harmful
to companion animals as it is humans. Cats living with smokers are twice as likely to
develop malignant lymphoma, and dogs living with smokers develop cancers of the nose and
sinus area, all of which are terminal within a year.
And then there’s the human cost of tobacco farming. Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS) is cause
by the constant exposure of workers to the nicotine of the plants, which is absorbed
through their skin. This is exacerbated in the case of child workers and child labor
is a major issue within America’s tobacco farming. While several countries, including
major tobacco producers such as Brazil and India, prohibit children under 18 from working
on tobacco farms, in the US children as young as 12 work in fields for 50 to 60 hours a
week in extreme heat and with ongoing exposure to pesticides and nicotine.
And of course, there are the health consequences, which may or may not even be an inherently
vegan issue, and which is thoroughly documented elsewhere. If you are a smoker and want to
stop for any reason, please see the blog post for this video where I’ve included a list
of resources to support you in quitting.
I hope that this video has been helpful. I’d love to hear your thoughts- do you think smoking
can be considered vegan? If you were a smoker who went vegan, did you quit? Are you a non-vegan
smoker wanting to go vegan but overwhelmed that now you have to ditch the cigarettes
too? [If so, personally, I’d say focus on the meat, dairy, eggs and honey first and
then tackle big tobacco.] The time it to produce this video clocks in
at around ____ . If you’d like to help support Bite Size Vegan so I can keep
putting hours to bring you this educational resource, please check out the support links
in the video description below where you can give a one-time donation or receive perks
and rewards for your support by joining the Nugget Army--the link for that is also in
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more awesome vegan content every Monday, Wednesday, and some Fridays! Now go live vegan, just
say no, and I’ll see you soon.
In a repeated national survey, doctors in all branches of medicine
doctors in all parts of the country we asked, "what cigarette do you smoke doctor?"
Once again, the brand named most was Camel.
Yes, according to this repeated nationwide survey, more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.
Why not change to Camels for the next 30 days and see what a difference it makes
in your smoking enjoyment. See how Camels agree with your throat.
See how mild and good tasting a cigarette can be.