You have it wrong. A government funded study published last year in the leading journal on regulatory toxicology knocked Pankow off the map. This was not a theoretical study, but solid experimental work with commercial cigarettes, both with and without ammonia treatment. Perhaps the list administrator will send you a reprint if I send him one.

Mainstream cigarette smoke is generally acidic, especially when people puff harder and more frequently than the FTC smoking machines. The one main exception would be a 100-mm long cigarette with 80+% filter ventilation and smoked under FTC conditions. All of above fits with Jim Pankow’s theory of absorptive partitioning; but Pankow won’t believe his own theory as it doesn’t give the politically correct results. Indeed, Pankow, in his lastest work, admits that the amount of free-base nicotine in the smoke of a Marlboro is very, very small.

Pankow’s work has been funded by those who are trying to win court cases by attempting to show cigarette companies made special efforts (use of ammonia) to put free-base nicotine in cigarette smoke. We now know that the ammonia does many other things, but does not make free-base nicotine.

JHL

You’ll never hear if from abstinence-only War on Drugs proponents, but snorting cocaine is also a harm reduction alternative to smoking crack.

For those of us who are not scientists and who believe like Bill that nicotine is not the issue, can you tell us what free-base nicotine means, how it is different from nicotine, and why we should be concerned about this?