The Problem of Arsenic in American Cigarette Tobacco

Abstract

OFFICIAL declassification of tobacco as a drug, by its removal from the United States Pharma-copoeia, definitively exempted all tobacco products from control under the Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906, and so established a legal obstacle to protection of the consumer from poisonous impurities in cigarette smoke.Thus were planted, fifty years ago, the seeds of a public-health problem that took root and developed so gradually that it was unnoticed until the report of Remington1 in 1927. Since then, its progress has been noted at intervals,2 3 4 but it has received little attention and no effective effort toward solution has . . .