Cigarette

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Cigarettes kill more than 8 million people every year. About half of those are the smokers themselves. The other million-plus are people who never lit one. They died breathing other people's smoke.

  This is not a story about weakness or bad choices. It is a story about a product that manufacturers once described, in their own words, as "a drug administration system for the delivery of nicotine in acceptable and attractive form." That phrase did not come from a critic or a regulator. It came from the companies that make cigarettes.

  How did a thin cylinder of processed leaf and paper become the most common method of tobacco consumption on earth? How did it travel from Maya temple carvings to the trenches of the Crimean War to trillion-unit annual production? And how did it remain that dominant even as the science against it piled up decade by decade?

  Those are the questions this documentary will trace. By the end, one detail may surprise you: the closest anyone ever came to a cancer-free cigarette was a project named TAME, run by a scientist named James Mold. It was shut down in 1978.

• 2. From Reed to Paper

  ›

  Around the 9th century, people in Mexico and Central America were already smoking tobacco in reeds and hollowed tubes. The Maya were among the first, and later the Aztecs built the practice into religious ritual. Priests and deities appear on pottery and temple engravings holding smoking instruments, which tells us this was not casual behavior. It was ceremonial.

  When Spanish colonizers encountered smoking in the Caribbean and the Americas, they brought it back to Europe. In the crossing, the leaf wrappers changed. Maize husks gave way, by the 17th century, to fine paper. The resulting product was called papelate. Francisco Goya documented it in the 18th century across three paintings: La Cometa, La Merienda en el Manzanares, and El juego de la pelota a pala.

  By 1830, the cigarette had reached France and picked up the French name it still carries in English. In 1845, the French state tobacco monopoly began manufacturing cigarettes at scale. The French word migrated into English during the 1840s. Some American reformers tried to establish the alternate spelling "cigaret," but it never took hold and is now largely forgotten.

  The critical industrial leap came in 1847, when Juan Nepomuceno Adorno of Mexico received the first patent for a cigarette-making machine. A second machine, developed in the 1880s by James Albert Bonsack, transformed the industry entirely. Before Bonsack, a company might produce around 40,000 hand-rolled cigarettes in a day. His machine pushed that number to roughly 4 million.

• 3. The Tobacco Trust

  ›

  James Buchanan Duke saw the Bonsack machine and moved fast. His firm, W. Duke & Sons & Co., had been a smoking tobacco producer only. In the early 1880s it pivoted into cigarettes, installed two Bonsack machines, and Duke poured money into advertising and promotion. By 1889, W. Duke & Sons was the largest cigarette manufacturer in the United States.

  In 1890, Duke combined forces with the four other major cigarette companies to create the American Tobacco Company, which acquired the nickname "the Tobacco Trust." The trust used aggressive tactics against hundreds of small competitors until they sold out. Its reach expanded quickly to cigars, chewing tobacco, snuff, and pipe blends. The companies Liggett & Myers and R.J. Reynolds were drawn in, along with P. Lorillard, an old-line snuff manufacturer.

  By 1910, the American Tobacco Company produced 86% of all cigarettes made in the United States, and between 75% and 95% of other tobacco forms. Cigars were the single product it could not dominate. They required slow hand-rolling and were produced in hundreds of small workshops, especially in New York City.

  The scale of the shift in American smoking habits across this period is striking. At the opening of the 20th century, per capita annual cigarette consumption in the United States was 54. By 1965, that figure had climbed to 4,259. At that peak, about 50% of men and 33% of women smoked more than 100 cigarettes per year.

• 4. What Is Inside

  ›

  Modern cigarettes are not simply rolled tobacco leaves. A typical factory-made cigarette contains a tobacco blend, paper, PVA glue, and usually a cellulose acetate filter. The tobacco blend itself involves careful engineering. Brightleaf, burley tobacco, and oriental tobacco form the main base, but processing those leaves produces byproducts: stems, dust, and small leaf fragments.

  Rather than discard those byproducts, manufacturers process them back into the blend. Reconstituted leaf sheet, known as RL, is made from recycled tobacco fibers and soluble chemicals extracted from byproducts, then reconstructed in a process similar to paper manufacturing. At the reconstitution stage, ammonium additives are applied to make nicotine more volatile as the cigarette burns, which increases the effective delivery of the drug. According to World Health Organization data, the amount of tobacco per thousand cigarettes fell from 2.28 pounds in 1960 to 0.91 pounds in 1999, largely because of reconstitution, fluffing, and additives.

  A list of 599 cigarette additives, assembled by five major American cigarette companies, was approved by the Department of Health and Human Services in April 1994. None of those additives appears on any cigarette pack as an ingredient. One class on the list, ammonia salts, converts bound nicotine in tobacco smoke into free nicotine molecules through a process called freebasing, potentially amplifying the drug's effect on the smoker.

  The paper itself is engineered too. Bands of alternating porosity run across the length of each cigarette at regular intervals, designed to keep the cigarette burning steadily when being drawn and slow it when resting. The mouthpiece paper is pierced with one or two rows of laser-drilled holes to moderate smoke delivery.

• 5. The Body's Accounting

  ›

  Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemical compounds, including nicotine, carbon monoxide, acrolein, and a range of oxidant substances. More than 70 of those compounds are carcinogens. A 2024 study estimated that each cigarette reduces life expectancy by 20 minutes; other studies put the average closer to 11 minutes per cigarette.

  Researchers at Cunningham and colleagues identified the most damaging compounds by combining the microgram weight of each in one cigarette's smoke with its known genotoxic effect. The top carcinogens include acrolein at 122.4 micrograms per cigarette, 1,3-butadiene at 105 micrograms, isoprene at 952 micrograms, and acetaldehyde at 1,448 micrograms. Each damages DNA through distinct mechanisms: acrolein forms crosslinks between DNA strands and proteins, while isoprene causes single and double strand breaks.

  Nicotine drives the addiction by acting on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and triggering the release of dopamine, glutamate, and gamma-aminobutyric acid. Research has found that the nicotinic receptors in the brain return to a nonsmoker's baseline level between 6 and 12 weeks after quitting. A 2011 study by Rubinstein and colleagues used neuroimaging to show that even adolescents smoking as few as 1 to 5 cigarettes per day showed measurably decreased brain response to pleasurable food cues, suggesting neural changes consistent with dependence at very low exposure levels.

  Secondhand smoke presents its own toll. It has been estimated to cause 38,000 deaths per year in the United States, of which 3,400 are lung cancer deaths in people who never smoked. Nonsmokers exposed at home or at work face a 25-30% increase in heart disease risk and a 20-30% increase in lung cancer risk. The World Health Organization concluded that no level of exposure to secondhand smoke is safe.

• 6. Regulation, Packaging, and the Plain Pack

  ›

  Canada, Australia, and more than two dozen other countries now require both text warnings and graphic images on cigarette packs. The United States has implemented text warnings but not graphic ones. Iceland became the first country to enforce graphic warnings on packaging, in 1985.

  Australia took the farthest step. As of April 2011, Australian regulations required all packaging to use an olive green color that researchers identified as the least attractive, with graphic health warnings covering 75% of the front and all of the back. In August 2012, the High Court of Australia dismissed a lawsuit brought by Philip Morris International, Japan Tobacco Inc., British American Tobacco, and Imperial Tobacco. On the 1st of December 2012, Australia became the first country to require brand-free plain packaging, with health warnings covering 90% of the back and 70% of the front.

  Taxation has worked as a parallel lever. Every 10% increase in the price of cigarettes reduces youth smoking by about 7% and overall consumption by about 4%. The World Health Organization recommends that cigarettes be taxed at a minimum of 75% of their sale price globally.

  In 2004, Bhutan became the first country to completely outlaw the cultivation, harvesting, production, and sale of tobacco products. Brazil, in March 2012, became the world's first country to ban all flavored tobacco including menthol, and prohibited most of the roughly 600 additives used, permitting only eight. In October 2023, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proposed banning cigarette sales to anyone born after 2008.

• 7. Fire, Butts, and the Electronic Turn

  ›

  Cigarettes and other lit smoking materials account for about 28% of fires involving upholstered furniture, particularly when smokers fall asleep with a lit item. Between 2005 and 2007, a European Union study of 16 countries found that 11,000 fires were caused by careless cigarette handling, resulting in 520 deaths and 1,600 injuries.

  New York was the first U.S. state to mandate fire-safe cigarettes, a standard later adopted nationwide. Fire-safe cigarettes use paper engineered with bands of microcrystalline cellulose that slow idle burning and allow the cigarette to self-extinguish. The European Union required fire-safety compliance for all cigarettes sold within its borders from 2011. Depending on the country and type of fire, fire-safe cigarettes reduce risk by approximately 11-45%.

  Cigarette butts are the most numerically frequent litter in the world. The butt, typically about 30% of the cigarette's original length, accumulates near buildings, parking lots, and streets, and can travel through storm drains to rivers and beaches. In a 2013 trial, the city of Vancouver partnered with the company TerraCycle and offered a reward of 1 cent per collected butt to test whether a deposit system like those used for beverage containers could encourage recycling.

  Electronic cigarettes entered wide use in the 21st century. By 2019 and 2020, an outbreak of severe lung illness across the United States was linked to vaping products, raising serious public health concern. Youth who use e-cigarettes are more likely to go on to smoke conventional cigarettes, a pattern that regulators have identified as a possible reversal of progress made in reducing youth smoking rates.