Asbestos and the Cigarette Industry
Known for its miraculous heat and fire resistance, it comes to no surprise that asbestos has been used by the cigarette industry. Once mixed with tobacco to make rolling papers for cigarettes, the papers were bound in book form and offered a smooth, slow-burning experience. Asbestos was also once mixed with loose leaf tobacco intended for smoking in a pipe. The natural mineral was blended with tobacco and was not observable by the human eye. Additionally, asbestos bore no taste or smell and did not interfere with the tobacco flavor. Consumers raved about the tobacco-asbestos blend, as it left the pipe dry and free of dirty moisture on the stem.
In addition to cigarette papers and loose leaf tobacco blends, asbestos was also used in the first cigarette filter on the market. With rising medical concerns on the health effects of smoking cigarettes, Lorillado Tobacco Company (the 18th oldest company in the United States and the oldest tobacco company) produced the first cigarette filter in 1952. Fitted to the company's Kent brand of cigarettes, the new "Micronite" filter was considered the healthiest cigarette by medical industry. In fact, Lorillado took out full page ads in the Journal of the American Medical Association boasting of the filter's ability to remove tar and nicotine.
Seemingly a wonderful concept at the time, asbestos was spun into tiny, fine fibers that trapped other hazardous chemicals smaller than a micron. Kent filters used the crocidolite form of asbestos, which is known to cause mesothelioma cancer more effectively than any other form of asbestos. The only problem was the asbestos fibers didn't stay in the filter. The small fibers broke loose from the filter and entered smokers' lungs transporting particles of tar and nicotine. Lorillado became aware of this in 1954, but Kent was seeing great profits and didn't take the asbestos out of the filter for nearly two more years.
Between 1952 and 1956 (when Lorillado removed asbestos from the filter), Lorillado produced approximately 13 billion Kent cigarettes. During Kent's best-selling year (1954), about 550,000 packs were sold every day in the United States. But smokers were not the only ones affected by the asbestos-laden filters, as an epidemic of asbestosis, lung cancer, and malignant mesothelioma has risen among workers of the factory where Kent cigarettes were produced. For example, even though Kent factory worker Stella Manzo never smoked cigarettes, she died of mesothelioma in 1989 from exposure to asbestos received at the factory.
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