Re: Basic ingredients

This is all most likely true, but if you replace the tobacco with pretty much any other organic tissue, you will find the same sort of stuff. Anything that produces smoke produces all sorts of random poisonous byproducts. The metals and minerals are present in trace amounts in pretty much anything that was at one point alive. The big organic molecules are made by incomplete combustion and various reactions where the activation energy is supplied by the burning and then the completed product wafts away in the smoke.

That doesn't make it any less bad for you to breathe in cigarette smoke, but it's not terribly much different than any other sort of smoldering leaves or wood or whatever. I guess the point is that tobacco smoke is not unique for what it contains as much as for the fact that people deliberately breathe it in, and that is because of the nicotine, and that's where the attention should be focused.