>>1467757>contd.Lung cancer starting become more prevalent in medical records in the late 1800s, early 1900s. This isn’t because doctors suddenly figured out that the tobacco people had been consuming for thousands of years was a death sentence, it’s because a new product emerged which fundamentally changed how people smoked: cigarettes.
Cigarettes were invented in the 1880s not long after the US Civil War ended. When slavery was abolished, all the former slaves who were expects in growing fine pipe tobacco, handrolling cigars, etc, fled the tobacco plantations and plantation owners were basically fucked. They lost their entire workforce, and were left in their own growing inferior and inconsistent product. The industrial cigarette was the direct solution to this problem because it meant that you could take inferior crops sourced from all over, chop them up and reconstitute them into sheets, and then chop up those sheets into something that looked like loose tobacco. This product tasted and burned horribly, which meant that had to be corrected by adding flavorings and sugars and other chemicals to correct the burn and increase absorption. Because there was no one left to roll cigars for free, reconstituted Sheet tobacco was rolled by machine into paper tubes.
You don’t have to inhale pipe smoke and you don’t have to inhale cigars for nicotine to be absorbed across mucous membranes. You do have to inhale cigarettes. This is why early advertisements for cigarettes included specific instructions that users must inhale the smoke to gain the Benifits of nicotine. Pic related.
