How Marlboro Became Number One
June 27th, 2008
admin wrote an interesting post today on
Here’s a quick excerpt
How did Marlboro cigarettes, the best-selling brand in the world, ever get so popular in the first place? Was it really the Marlboro Man? Did people just like the taste? What? According to a new study in this month’s American Journal of Public Health the secret may well have been “freebase nicotine.” Really.
For a long time, many cigarette companies used ammonia during the manufacturing process to inflate the volume of tobacco, accentuate certain flavors, or even get rid of a few carcinogens. But in the early 1960s, according to Terrell Stevenson and Robert Proctor, Philip Morris started using ammonia to freebase the nicotine in cigarette smoke, creating a form of “crack nicotine” that delivered a speedier, sharper kick, and essentially allowed Philip Morris to keep rolling out addictive cigarettes while lowering tar and nicotine levels to allay public fears.
Read the rest of this great post here
Posted in CiglessBot