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Smoking Facts About Radioactive Ingredients in Cigarettes

Some cigarette ingredients have been found to be radioactive.

Polonium-210 and lead (Pb210) are both radioactive elements that contribute to the harmful effects of tobacco combustion.

You may be aware that certain elements like arsenic and cyanide are chemicals contained in a cigarette, but radioactive elements?

One of the harmful effects of tobacco may be increased radiation doses.

Yes it is true. Polonium-210 and Lead-210 are both radioactive substances found as natural contaminants of tobacco. This means you inhale them in your cigarette smoke and your lungs may be exposed to radioactive substances in concentrations that are significant enough to cause cancer.

It is now clear that polonium-210 and lead-210 concentrate in the tobacco leaf although the exact mechanism for why this might be so is not completely understood.

Many measurements on the radio-isotope levels of the tobacco leaf have confirmed this and it has been known for almost fifty years.

The Tobacco Industry Was Aware of the Radioactive Cigarette Ingredients

In 1964 the evidence started to accumulate that there may be an association between radioactive elements such as polonium-210 in cigarettes and the increasing incidence of bronchogenic carcinoma that was strongly suspected as being one of the harmful effects of tobacco smoking.

Of course cigarette manufacturers did not want this to be true and so they hid the information all the while trying to find some way to prove that lung cancer was not caused by smoking their cigarettes.

Their own research lead them closer and closer to the realization that you could get lung cancer from smoking their cigarettes, so they had to suppress the information in some way while they worked on a solution to removing or at least controlling for these radioactive elements in their product.

By 1980 they had failed on all accounts. An inter-office memo shows that Phillip Morris was aware of the radioactive elements in cigarettes and acknowledged the presence of radioactive cigarette ingredients (lead [Pb 210] and Polonium 210) in their products.

Smoking Facts About Radioactive Cigarette Ingredients

• A heavy smoker may have exposures up to seven times greater than the general population. This exposure is concentrated in the lungs.


• There is recognition that polonium-210 may have a role in the development of bronchogenic carcinoma or lung cancer.


• Polonium-210 is the only ingredient in cigarette smoke that has produced cancer by itself in laboratory animals by inhalation. The tumors appeared at a polonium level 1/5^th the dose you could expect in a heavy smoker.


• the Center for Disease Control states that smoking is the main source of radiation exposure for Americans.

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