Hand Rolled Cigarettes and Health Risks
Over the past few years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of smokers who are opting to roll their own cigarettes. They might rely on rolling papers and lose tobacco, or they might even invest in one of the many types of gadgets or machines that facilitate the creation of homemade cigarettes too. Some smokers are choosing to do this because they want to save money, some think that rolling their own means they will smoke less, and still others believe that this sort of smoking is healthier than a package of pre-made “smokes”.
Firstly, the only safe cigarette is one that remains unlit and un-smoked – there is just no safe way to consume a tobacco product. Secondly, when a smoker decides to roll their own they are often eliminating many of the four thousand chemicals that they will have in their pre-made cigarettes, but they are actually exposing themselves to an equally dangerous set of compounds.
Hand rolled cigarettes have more nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide than the regular varieties, and this leads to a substantially higher risk for the development of lung, oesophageal, mouth, larynx and pharynx cancers too.
Carbon monoxide is the well-known poisonous gas that pollutes the atmosphere and is capable of killing living things at high levels. It prevents the blood from carrying oxygen, and it is present in shockingly high levels in cigarette smoke. It is even more readily available in hand rolled cigarettes too. .
Tar is the stuff that makes smokers get yellow teeth and fingertips, and standard cigarette filters block the majority of this substance from actually reaching the smoker’s body. With the hand rolled versions, however, there are styles that provide no interference between the smoker and the enormous amounts of tar contained in tobacco .
Nicotine, as most know, is the material in all cigarettes that makes them so remarkably addictive. Just like strychnine and arsenic, however, it is a highly lethal compound. It is, in fact, one of the strongest poisons in the world. With hand rolled cigarettes, the smoker is getting much higher levels of this remarkably toxic substance. Additionally, all smokers develop a resistance to the effects of nicotine over time, and this means that smoking higher levels of it is going to lead to ever increasing tobacco consumption.
This leads to the final point about hand rolled cigarettes – they will not end up saving much money because the smoker is going to actually see their need for nicotine increase over time; leading to ever increasing numbers of cigarettes made and smoked.
