BLURRING THE LINE BETWEEN FOOD AND TOBACCO

Sugar, enhanced through flue-curing and added via sweeteners, is what allows relatively easy inhalation of cigarette smoke, and deep inhalation into the lungs is what makes nicotine administration via cigarette-smoking so much more addictive than any other route of administration. So the cigarette is, at its very core, a "candied-up contraption," as Robert Proctor puts it in his recent book, Golden Holocaust. Food mix-ins are routinely used to seduce children into tobacco use - for example, via low-priced starter products laced with food or food-like ingredients intended to make them mild and sweet, via hookah bars and shisha cafes peddling intensely food-flavored tobacco to college students, and most recently via flavored e-cigarettes. Quirkier examples include those chichi New York restaurants that, with the introduction and enforcement of clean indoor air policies, experimented - mercifully briefly - with tobacco as a dessert ingredient, to satisfy their smoking customers' desire to end the meal with a dose of nicotine; and of course the "Nicotini." ​​

Yes, you can still buy candy cigarettes.

An ashtray - or a frying pan?