What do corn silk, banana skins, and weeds have in common? People desperate for a smoke have used them all in improvised cigarettes.

If something can be rolled up and smoked, you can wager somebody, someplace, has rolled it up and smoked it. The majority of these experiments don't get extremely far, however a couple of non-tobacco compounds have actually handled to capture on. "alternative" cigarettes have become a thriving company. Some contain mixes of herbs; some integrate tobacco with cloves, dried tendu leaves (a plant from India and Southeast Asia), and other unusual components.

Alternative cigarettes-- cost lots of corner store and over the Internet-- are easy to find and simple to purchase, even for kids who aren't old sufficient to purchase tobacco. They frequently look unique and can be found in attractive flavors such as cherry or vanilla. Their greatest selling point is that they're supposed to be a healthy alternative to "real" cigarettes. As one online merchant of natural tobacco and clove cigarettes put it, "Got ta smoke? Smoke clever!"

But in spite of this marketing tactic, alternative cigarettes are NOT safe. In truth, some are substantially more harmful than regular cigarettes. As the director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Affairs as soon as specified, "There's no such thing as a safe smoke."

Just being without ingredients-- or in the case of natural cigarettes, without nicotine-- doesn't make them more secure, says Matthew Gold, a personnel attorney for the FTC. "Any type of cigarette you smoke has tar and carbon monoxide gas, which have very real health threats related to them." Gold won a case against Alternative Cigarettes, Inc. that required the company to display health warnings on its products.

Among the most popular kinds of alternative cigarettes are bidi, natural, and clove cigarettes, all of which are particularly popular with young people. Here's a close-up look at their risks:

Organic cigarettes

Herbal cigarettes are nicotine-free and tobacco-free, however they are far from risk-free. "Many individuals assume that anything natural or natural isn't unsafe, and that's not real," Banzhaf states.

Natural Gold cigarettes are a prime example. Organic Gold cigarettes contain a mix of herbs including marshmallow (the plant, not the hot chocolate topping), passion jasmine, ginseng, and flower.

In April 2000, the commission ordered the makers of Herbal Gold (as well as another organic cigarette manufacturer) to include the following caution to all packages: "Natural cigarettes are hazardous to your health. Another FTC problem against Alternative Cigarettes and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Business-- the makers of "Natural American Spirit" cigarettes-- ended with the producers agreeing to cease marketing claims that their cigarettes were safer due to the fact that they contained no ingredients.

Clove cigarettes

Understood as https://diigo.com/0eu1p2 kreteks, these cigarettes consist of about 60 percent tobacco and 40 percent ground cloves. (Some baby boomers may keep in mind buying them in exotic packages with an image of a volcano on the front.) Far from being much healthier to smoke, kreteks deliver two times as much nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide as regular cigarettes, according to the American Lung Association.

In addition, switching tobacco for cloves isn't necessarily an excellent trade. In a few vulnerable individuals, clove cigarettes have actually even triggered coma and life-threatening lung injury, including lung edema, a condition in which the lungs fill up with fluid.