Public health professor Thomas Novotny from San Diego State University's School of Public Health has just co-authored an editorial in The British Medical Journal calling for a ban on filtered cigarettes.
He says some 6 trillion cigarettes are produced and smoked worldwide every year and that vast numbers of discarded butts end up in the natural environment and potentially eaten by animals.
Photo: Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
And filter cigarettes, he claims, have no discernible health benefits; in fact, they could be encouraging us to smoke more and inhale more deeply, causing more aggressive types of cancer.
"The filter is ultimately a marketing tool, they say it makes it easier to smoke, it makes it cleaner to smoke. You don’t get pieces of tobacco in your mouth when you inhale and it makes it palatable in general."
Dr Novotny says companies tried to develop biodegradable filters in the 1990s but couldn’t land on anything that was acceptable to customers.
"They certainly weren’t willing to let go of the filter as one of their main marketing tools since the 1950s. It just doesn’t work. So what they’ve done instead is try to find downstream solutions like clean-up campaigns, handheld ashtrays and so on which really don’t solve the problem upstream."
"Talking about banning the sale of filters is a way of reducing the trash that is caused by them upstream without any impact on health as a result."
He says that testing which showed filters reduce the amounts of tar from cigarettes are misleading because they were from machine experiments and didn't account for human behaviour, such as deeper inhalation.
"Cigarette smoking related cancers have gone down in general, not because of the filter, but because people have quit smoking."
