Sounds tempting, doesn’t it? This is how big tobacco has

marketed their product

for years—smooth, delicious and tasty. It’s not the great taste that keeps people lighting up. Cigarette companies uses the cheapest tobacco around to mass produce their weapons of mass destruction at a cost of just 5 cents a cigarette. What keeps you coming back is the chemical cocktail of death big tobacco has concocted to keep you hooked and kill you.

Every time you light up, more than 7000 chemicals enter your body, and the bodies of those around you, whether they’re adults, children, or pets. I can’t list them all because I’ll run out of space, but here are a few of their favorites:

Ammonia (cat pee)

Arsenic (rat poison)

Butane (lighter fluid)

Carbon monoxide (noxious gas)

Cyanide (self-explanatory)

DDT (insecticide)

Formaldehyde (embalming fluid)

Polonium (radioactive element)

The list goes on

To quote an old Camel ad, it sounds “mighty tasty,” doesn’t it? Big tobacco has paid masterful chemists for more than a century to use low-grade tobacco, GMOs and poison to keep people like you and me addicted. In fact, cigarettes are

more addictive than heroin

. And you can’t buy heroin at Walgreens.

Despite the blatant facts, big tobacco has paid off government agencies, the media, and scientists to keep their products readily available and shift the blame to vape products and nicotine, the least harmful ingredient in the bunch. As a Reuters article points out, “

The health warning on Altria’s MarkTen electronic cigarette package is 116 words long.

That's much longer than the warnings on traditional cigarette packs in the United States.”

There’s no lengthy nicotine warning on cigarettes. Here are a few facts about nicotine that big tobacco doesn’t want you to know:

So, why criminalize nicotine and make the public deathly afraid of things like vape products and e-cigs even though they’re 95% less harmful than cigarettes?

Because it keeps big tobacco on top.

Not only is big tobacco an expert at buying the media and the government, they’ve secured their status on the market thanks to Ted Kennedy, who helped make sure the FDA regulates tobacco under the Tobacco Control Act. That might seem like a good thing, but it’s not. The Tobacco Control Act, which already protects death sticks that have cornered the market, can limit whether or not new tobacco products can be approved. As a result, we have the Pre-Market Tobacco Product Application, an expensive process that vape companies might be subject to if the FDA deeming regulations go through without

HR 2058

.

The FDA has become a gatekeeper for big tobacco. Vape products and e-cigarettes have surged in popularity because people finally had a less harmful alternative to smoking. Big tobacco didn’t like that. It was an RJ Reynolds rep who said of vaping, “we believe the FDA should not allow such products to be sold or marketed.” Reynolds lobbied

for the FDA to ban vaping. Meanwhile, Reynolds, Altria and Lorillard made their own e-cigs: VUSE, Mark 10, blu, because they’re the only ones who could afford the Pre-Market Tobacco Application if it goes through.

So the lies keep on spreading like a house fire from an unextinguished cigarette. As a Reynolds spokesperson said in opposition to vaping,

“[vaping products]

fall outside regulatory inspection and oversight; and many nicotine liquids are sold in non-child-resistant packaging in flavors that may be appealing to youth.”

Because big tobacco cares...about filling their pockets and filling graves.