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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

Probably the most prolific killer as far as radioactive vegetation is Polonium 210 in tobacco. [0]

I always thought it made a good case for organic cigarettes, which otherwise sounds really silly on the face of it. My logic being that organic tobacco should not use phosphate fertilizer which is likely the source.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19960838/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19186689/

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I read something about that years ago, and the thing that made it stand out was how binary it was. You could smoke for twenty years, then one day you get a tiny mote of some radioactive element stuck in your lung and all the sudden it's cancer time. Primarily people shouldn't smoke cigarettes, but it just seems like a cruel twist that they would fertilize the crops with something that does that.

I sometimes think it might be nice to grow some quality pipe tobacco in my garden. My understanding is that if you intersperse it with other plants it acts as a natural pest repellant. And while I'm virtually a non-smoker (about 20 cigarettes in my entire life and a handful of cigars), I can see the appeal of occasionally smoking a pipe packed with tobacco that I grew and cured myself.

I have no source and could be completely wrong, but anecdotally it seems that Japan smokes like a fucking fiend and yet doesn’t have people dropping like flies from cancer. They also are far more selective of their tobacco and perhaps, unlike the US, forced tobacco companies to stop using such fertilizer?

> Explanations for the smoking paradox in Japan

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12889681/

I believe most (though perhaps not all) definitions of "organic" do allow phosphate rock fertilizer.

Damn. This is a sensitive issue. Imagine if you were in charge of public health. Would it be a good idea to spend money on making cigarettes “safer” or better to encourage smoking cessation?

is this used with weed crops

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