Actually, that's not accurate. Chewing tobacco also causes cancer, and it has nothing to do with it being ignited. I see loads of jaw and mouth cancer patients who have cancer because of chewing tobacco. Tobacco itself is carinogenic. While commercial cigarettes have other chemicals added which are additionally problematic, even hand-rolled, do-it-yourself smokes are carcinogenic. Sorry, guys. There's just no may to use tobacco (other than applying it externally to bruises) that doesn't carry a significant risk of cancer.
Yeah, but I was only referring to smoking and you don't chew cigarettes.
I wasn't saying that if you don't burn tobacco it's safe. It isn't by a really long way. Just that the really nastiest stuff in cigarette smoke comes from burning. I remember hearing once that they'd actually noticed that there was some pattern to the damage in most malignant lung tumours that allowed them to say that PAHs were the cause of that tumour.
After the PAHs I think the next biggest nasty are nitrosamines in the tobacco. But again burning the tobacco makes more of those than were originally present.
With chewing tobacco you've got a different mode of action. IIRC chewing tobacco gets more toxic after you put it in your mouth because your saliva breaks down some of the chemicals in it into much more carcinogenic chemicals.
So I guess the point I was making was simply that you can't assume that hand-rolled are any safer than standard cigarettes unless you've got some data on the amount and kind of carcinogens they both produce. They could easily be worse. The fact that they have less chemicals in the actual tobacco means little if the cigarette itself produces much more PAH.
