Today, everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. It hurts your lungs and causes cancer. Back in the day, this wasn’t common knowledge. Once people started to catch on to the dangers of tobacco, cigarette companies attempted to make cigarettes safer. Or rather they attempted to convince consumers that they were safer.
One way they did this was by introducing menthol cigarettes. Menthol was supposed to be good for your lungs so perhaps it would combat the negative effects of the tobacco. Filtered cigarettes were another attempt at increasing their safety. This attempt failed miserably.
The P. Lorillard Company decided to use asbestos as a filter. Asbestos could be spun into tiny threads to act as an effective filter and was relatively cheap. These new filtered cigarettes were advertised as “the greatest health protection in cigarette history.”
Unfortunately, the filter was 30% Brazilian asbestos, which is hugely harmful to the lungs and can cause lung cancer. The filter also made the cigarette tougher to draw, which meant people were using more suction to breathe it in and drawing the chemicals deeper into their lungs.