My question is I can understand tobacco being processed but would like to know on who's authority did the T companies receive approval to add all this extra toxic garbage. Whoever it was personally they should be ashamed of themselves for such a performing such a deadly disservice to their fellow man/ woman/ human being.
That's a much more complicated issue than you might think, and certainly more complicated than some of the anti-smoking extremists would have us think. One thing to keep in mind when you're looking at a list of "ingredients" like that (to be fair), is that the VAST majority of them are naturally occurring chemicals in the tobacco or byproducts of burning the tobacco, and not additives. Frankly, if a person were to take the time to lay out the full chemical composition of a cheeseburger (not just the ingredients) it would probably "look" just as terrifying.
Of the ones that are additives, most of them are not particularly dangerous. Most of the danger comes from inhaling smoke, and all of the horrible unstable compounds created by burning tobacco. That said, MANY of them are additives, and many of those are quite dangerous.
As for the authority, you have to remember that cigarettes pre-date the FDA by a long time, and even when the FDA was formed, it was primarily concerned with food safety. In terms of the big picture, regulation of cigarettes is a comparatively new thing. What's worse, is that some of the chemical additives are actually mandated by the FDA. For instance, all cigarettes must be made with paper that has been treated with fire ......ant chemicals because some genius thought that the fire danger of cigarettes was important enough to make smokers inhale the stuff. That, in turn, forced tobacco companies to add more chemicals to the paper and to the tobacco to at least partially counteract the fire ......ants so a person could smoke a cigarette at a 'normal' pace without it going out.
While cigarettes have always been bad for the smoker, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the FDA has actually made them worse. Before heavy-handed regulation set in, making a profit from tobacco was as easy as making a profit running a casino. As regulations and taxes cut into profit margins, tobacco companies were forced to find more and more ways to not only make their products cheaper and to circumvent harmful regulations (like the fire ......ants), but also to keep their customers buying as prices went up.
