Since Alexander Litvinenko’s death there’s been a lot of talk about polonium-210, the radioactive material that killed him. This brought to light another issue seldom discussed in the media–that tobacco contains high levels of the stuff, due to chemical fertilizers. In 1990 Surgeon General C. Everett Koop went on record stating that radiation from tobacco was responsible for approximately 90 percent of tobacco-related cancers. So I ask you, Cecil: what’s the straight dope on this? Does smoking organically grown tobacco instead of commercially grown tobacco lower the chance of lung cancer? –DM, via email
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Nothing in the world, DM, is so powerful as an idea that tells people exactly what they want to hear, and by this standard the notion that fertilizer-borne polonium might be the truly lethal ingredient in cigarettes is a blue-ribbon champ. Smokers are thrilled to learn it’s not the tobacco itself that’s murdering them, while cannabis advocates see an argument for weed’s relative safety. Anticorporate types get another tale of ghoulish multinationals swigging the peons’ blood; conspiracy freaks get another instance where They’ve kept us from discovering What’s Really Going On. The only problem: beyond a few key nuggets of truth, the story doesn’t hold up.
But tobacco’s hardly the only place one encounters polonium. Other plants absorb it too, meaning it’s in the food we eat, possibly as much as 20 cigarettes’ worth in a day’s intake; at any given time our bodies contain about 23,000 cigarettes’ worth of polonium, largely in the liver, kidneys, spleen, and bone marrow. Granted, if you smoke as well as eat, your cancer risk likely goes up, but what part of that concept isn’t widely understood?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Slug Signorino.
