These people are nuts

Just when you think you've seen it all, along comes fourth hand smoke

It’s been fifteen years since the concept of ‘thirdhand smoke’ was invented. It never really took off, except in California where the frankly hilarious Thirdhand Smoke Resource Center is handsomely funded by taxpayers. According to that august institution: ‘Thirdhand smoke is the chemical residue that is left behind on clothes, skin, furniture, walls, and other surfaces after someone smokes.’ The implication is that if you can smell it, it could be killing you, but there is no evidence that people are harmed by the faint aroma of cigarettes smoked years earlier and, Californians aside, the public are not such hypochondriacs that they worry about such things.

Thirdhand smoke seemed like the last word in anti-tobacco hysteria, but it has just been trumped by a study from South Korea which urges people to watch out for unopened cigarette packets.

Our findings indicate that packaged, unopened, and uncombusted cigarettes in cigarette racks at tobacco retailers emits airborne nicotine, which is a previously unrecognized source of nicotine exposure. This result has implications for policy considerations, such as the potential installation of ventilation systems on cigarette racks or the exploration of alternative packaging methods.

The researchers used some highly sensitive technology to measure airborne nicotine levels in shops that sold cigarettes. One monitor was placed near the cigarette gantry while another was placed at the other side of the room.

The average airborne nicotine level was 0.0908 ug/m³ at Point 1 and 0.0345 ug/m³ at Point 2. We found a positive correlation (r=0.647, p <0.001) in nicotine concentration between the two measurement points... The airborne nicotine concentration at Point 1 was statistically significantly higher than at Point 2 (z=−2.326, p=0.020, effect size: 0.2215), especially at larger stores.

1 ug/m³ is one millionth of a gram per cubic metre of air. At the densest concentrations, the researchers found that there was less than 1/10,000,000th of a gram of nicotine per cubic metre. In Britain, the long-term workplace exposure limit is 500 ug/m³ and the short-term exposure limit is 1,500 ug/m³. It’s probably safe to say that you could spend your whole working life standing in front of shelves of cigarette packs and be OK. Smokers absorb around 1mg (1,000 ug) of nicotine from each cigarette and that doesn’t harm them, so nicotine certainly isn’t going to hurt you at the barely measureable level of 0.0908 ug/m^3.

I can only see an edited version of the study (please get in touch if you have the whole thing - UPDATE: a reader has kindly done this, see below), but it is enough to suggest that fourth hand smoke could become the latest taxpayer-funded grift in ‘public health’.

To the best our knowledge, no studies have been conducted on the spread of airborne nicotine in point-of-sale, tobacco retailer contexts.

What an oversight!

To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that ETS does not necessarily require the burning of tobacco (e.g., active smoking) in retailer settings.

ETS stands for environmental tobacco smoke. Since there is no smoke without fire, it is axiomatic that ETS does require the burning of tobacco. Even thirdhand smoke requires tobacco to have been burnt at some point in the past. What is being discussed here is more like homeopathy.

Given that even minimal exposure to smoking can pose risks to human health, and considering there is no identified safe threshold for exposure, the objective should be to minimize exposure as much as possible (Society, 2023) and the matter of low-concentration passive smoking exposure is emerging as a novel challenge (Sim and Park, 2021).

It bears repeating that there is no smoking involved in this study. The object of the researchers’ attention is packets of unsmoked cigarettes in sealed plastic wrappers and their supposed contribution to trace levels of a harmless substance in the air (much of which, I suspect, is the result of smokers walking up to the counter).

And yet, if you take the rhetoric about their being no safe level of tobacco literally, I suppose this is where you end up. In Clownsville.

UPDATE: I have now read the whole study and can share more words of wisdom from it:

…our data revealed very low-level exposures from cigarette racks (0.0020–0.2397 ug/m3) in our sample; currently, it is unclear whether these levels and circumstances pose a health risk or increase the concentration of smoking-related biomarkers in people’s bodies… These results were similar to the concentrations in a non-smoking area in other studies (Arechavala et al., 2018; Henderson et al., 2023; Martínez-Sanchez et al., 2014).

The ‘exposures’ near the cigarette racks in shops were pretty much indistinguishable from the exposures found in a non-smoking house inhabited by non-smokers and were orders of magnitude lower than houses in which at least one person smoked.

However, as far as our knowledge [sic], our study has significance in first confirming the possibility of nicotine release into the air from the cigarette shelf. Because there are no safe levels for SHS exposure, the safety of exposure to very low levels cannot be guaranteed

But it’s not SHS exposure, is it? In any case, the idea that there is no safe level of SHS is an unevidenced assertion which, for all practical purposes, is untrue.

SHS [secondhand smoke] may be more preventable because it involves direct exposure to tobacco smoke and is often detectable by senses (e.g., visual cues or odor), which can lead to increased awareness, especially in the presence of existing regulations and policies that limit SHS. Imperceptible nicotine exposure, however, is difficult to recognize and, therefore, may be more difficult to avoid in the absence of appropriate regulatory measures.

… The absence of appropriate regulations has health implications for retailer workers and customers as airborne nicotine is emitted from hundreds or thousands of cigarettes on display racks year-round [lol - CJS]. Currently, no policy exists to regulate this potentially harmful exposure.

How many more people will not have to die from ‘imperceptible nicotine exposure’ before the authorities finally act?!