The thread about how bad a bottle of wine a day is http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=514926 made me think about my friend’s cigar habit. He doesn’t smoke that much (maybe 3 a week), but I hear conflicting information about how bad cigars are compared to cigarettes. Cigars are bigger, but people smoke more cigarettes. Cigars take longer to smoke, but you don’t inhale. Then there are filters, second hand smoke, amount of tobacco etc.
I guess basically my question comes down to how bad are cigars compared to cigarettes, and how many would you have to have to increase your odds of cancer to those of someone who averages about a pack a day?
The standard “wisdom” of health authorities taught today in the US is that there it is not possible to quantify the harm of tobacco use, or even to qualify one tobacco product as “safer” than another. Certainly no tobacco company or doctor here is going to dare come out and say something like “Smoking 4 Black and Milds a day is approximately half as dangerous as smoking 2 packs of Marlboro Lights (or whatever they call them nowadays).”
Rather, the wisdom is that smoking is “dangerous”, and you can do one of two things, use tobacco, or don’t use it. If you use it, your heath is in danger. That is all.
If he’s to be believed, the risk of oral cancer from (in his analysis) snuff/chew is significantly lower than the risks of inhaled smoke (cigarettes). I would imagine (no cite) that cigars don’t expose you to much more contact with oral carcinogens as does chew/dip, which sits right on your gum for up to a few hours (the way I chew/dip, at least).
My gut tells me cigars are almost certainly better (I’ve also never personally known anyone to get cancer or another illness from cigars, but have known multiple cigarette smokers who got lung cancer or heart disease or emphysema).
I’ve had four surgeries for oral cancer and every surgeon who has performed them has always told me that smokeless tobacco is more dangerous than cigarettes. They have also told me that cigars are dangerous because plenty of people chew them and keep them in their mouths while smoking them. I don’t know of any studies to back this up but that’s what I was told.
The biggest danger of cigars is to your wallet. Those things are more expensive than crack. Take it from a guy who goes through 3-4 a day on the course, and plays golf way too much.
Cigars can certainly cause or contribute to cancer anywhere the smoke goes, so that would be the lips, mouth, nose (assuming most cigar smokers like to do what I might call the “French exhale”). So the danger’s definitely there.
On the other hand, it was only after a decades long trend by which cigarettes eclipsed cigars and smokeless tobacco in popularity as a means of consuming nicotine that the U.S. Surgeon General had the numbers in hand to issue the groundbreaking report in 1965. During this period, cigar and pipe smoking became relegated to an “old gent’s habit”, something your granddad would do, while cigarettes were heavily marketed as fashionable accessories to living.
I can’t help but think that the relative risk of occasional cigar smoking has to be far less than that of a regular cigarette habit. For most cigar smokers I have known, it’s not so much a habit as an occasional indulgence like a good bottle of wine. Mr. Smashy seems to be an exception to this, but I could be wrong.
Agreed. If cigar tobacco is cured correctly (and most premium handmade cigars are made of tobacco that is), it contains little to no nicotine. No cites, I’m afraid; but I’ll fall back on my experience as a cigar reviewer and commentator for various Toronto tobacconists’ newsletters some years ago. Generally speaking, the tobacco in premium handmade cigars is cured over a six to 12 month period, during which most or all of the nicotine naturally occurring in the tobacco leaches out of the leaves. I won’t get into the specifics of how cigar tobacco is cured over time–there are websites which will explain it better than I can–but by using a process that leaches the nicotine out, cigar tobacco can be said to be non-habit-forming. Many cigar connoisseurs do indeed look at cigars as a fine bottle of wine, to be enjoyed occasionally, and definitely not as a matter of habit.
Cigarette tobacco is flue-cured, which is a process designed to “lock in” the nicotine. Since nicotine is the addictive substance, cigarettes keep the smoker coming back for more, as it were.
Pipe tobacco is always blended from various kinds of tobacco (burley, virginia, latakia, etc.), which can be cured in various ways–all the way from the cigar tobacco’s nicotine-less method to cigarettes’ flue-curing. As a result, pipe tobacco blends can contain enough nicotine to “hook” the smoker, but pipe smokers don’t tend to inhale, so that danger is lessened, regardless of what blend the pipe smoker uses.
As for the OP, smoking tobacco is dangerous, no matter what product is smoked or how many or how often. Certainly, pipes and cigars can cause mouth and throat cancers and diseases, even if lung cancer is made more remote by consuming them without inhaling. However, I would guess that given the question as stated, your friend is better off smoking three cigars a week, as opposed to (say) a pack of cigarettes a day. At the very least, if circumstances keep him from smoking his three cigars a week, he won’t be going crazy from the cravings for nicotine that the cigarette smoker would suffer.
