Origin of Nicotine?

[seminolewind]

What harmful chemicals are actually in grown tobacco leaves? What's added, carcinogenic, and why, ie: arsenic or formaldehyde?

If we get nicotine from tobacco, how come we're not getting all the other bad chemicals as well?

[taz3cat]

Tobacco has nicotine, harmine, tar (oil from burning leaves) and a very few other things. The tobacco companys put all that other stuff in the cigarettes.
We us pure nicotin from tobacco and the process takes out the other stuff out.

[Satire]

Most of the toxic chemicals aren't actually found in the tobacco in its natural state (some are but most are not). The majority of the "baddies" come from the combustion of the organic material. In principal, when something is thoroughly burned it releases free oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen as all of the bonds are broken from the incredibly high energy, and leaves pure carbon (ash) behind. However, the burning is not complete when smoking because the temperature simply doesn't get high enough for complete oxidation, which leaves you with a bunch of random particles, often things like benzene (which is part of the chemical structure of many non-harmful organics) which has a solid ring structure that requires quite a bit of energy to break, are formed during incomplete combustion, turning a non-harmful organic molecule into a potent carcinogen (benzene). Of course, there are plenty of things that can deteriorate your health naturally found in the plant, but you get the idea. The reason why (in theory) none of the baddies are supposed to be found in the isolated nicotine, is that by taking advantage of the natural bonding tendencies and solubility properties of nicotine, one can separate it from the rest of the organic material pretty thoroughly. However, even pharmaceutical grade nicotine found in nicotine gum and such is not 100% pure, and still contains some traces of the original plant materials from the tobacco. The point is to get it as pure as possible, to the point where the impurities are of a negligible amount. As all commercial nicotine comes from tobacco, it will never be 100% pure, so if someone tells you their liquid has 0 of the tobacco baddies in it, make a mental note that that person is full of **** and probably doesn't know what they are talking about. Also bear in mind that the flavorings used in many of the liquids are quite possibly more harmful than the residual tobacco chemicals (we don't know because they don't tell us what's in it).

And no taz some evil man doesn't pour benzene on his product just to **** with you, smoking any plant material leads to inhaling dangerous chemicals, they actually do try to make it safer.

[taz3cat]

Satire, that was a good explaination.

[Kitabz]

Originally Posted by Satire

Most of the toxic chemicals aren't actually found in the tobacco in its natural state [...]

Top post, thanks!

[seminolewind]

Wow, excellent explaination. It's a good thing I took chem 101 in college, LOL. But I see what you're saying. It's kinda like breaking sodium away from chloride.

Also, what nasties do they add to tobacco, and why?

[Kitabz]

Originally Posted by seminolewind

Also, what nasties do they add to tobacco, and why?

I've just posted this link on another thread but you might find it interesting:
What's in a cigarette

The scientist's comments are especially interesting. If I may paraphrase him he's basically saying "smoking is bad for your health because you're inhaling smoke [burnt plants], forget about the other additives, they're unimportant health-wise in relative terms, i.e., the smoke is SO bad, the additives are negligible"

[frogbmth]

This makes a very interesting read

Vaping is not a complete substitute for tobacco smoking

[deewal]

It's part of the Universe and was probably created before we were.