What do cigarette filters do

It's a physical addiction, as discussed in How Nicotine Works. Smokers will inhale the amount of smoke necessary to get the dose of nicotine their bodies need.

Several of the pages in the links below talk about conscious and unconscious steps smokers take to thwart filters and get nicotine. The easiest way to avoid all of these problems is to avoid smoking in the first place -- that way your body never becomes dependent on nicotine.

If you're already addicted, an alternative is to get the nicotine through some mechanism other than cigarettes, such as nicotine gum and patches. That way, at least you eliminate the tar. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. You old enough to remember the s, Tom? Americans had by then been puffing happily away on their mass-manufactured smokes for half a century, while at the same time lung cancer—previously quite rare—was becoming epidemic.

It was only after the Second World War that scientists started putting the pieces together. Manufacturers did, however, put some cash behind a project to mitigate, in earnest, some of the malign side effects of smoking: the cigarette filter. And they appealed to textile and chemical companies for help. An early result was the Kent Micronite filter, designed by Lorillard; it used asbestos fibers to trap, uh, harmful substances.

It also proved excessively tricky for mass production, as did filters using natural materials like cotton and wool, which have a nonuniform structure. What manufacturers needed was something that could be made in volume and at low cost—Americans at the time were, after all, going through about billion cigarettes a year. The answer turned out to be a filter made of cellulose acetate.

This did, indeed, block a little tar and toxic gas, but smokers, ever resourceful, responded by changing their behavior—smoking more, taking deeper puffs, etc—thereby making the practical effect of the cellulose-acetate filter approximately nil.

Accordingly, the industry did something that conformed much more to our expectations for its behavior. One-fifth of adults incorrectly believed cigarette filters were biodegradable, but those who knew that filters are not biodegradable had nearly 1. Tobacco and the environment.

Policies to reduce cigarette litter have strong support. Harm Reduction Infographic. Greater nicotine flux is associated with greater dependence among pod-based e-cigarette users, new research shows. Home Research and resources Cigarette filters mislead consumers, with 1 in 3 smokers falsely believing filters reduce harm.