Trapped at Berkeley

After five weeks of intense work, I’ve finally finished my Chemistry 4B special project, “The CO Content in Cigarette Smoke”.

Here’s a graphical representation of my results:

Surprisingly, Virginia Slims cigarette smoke had the highest concentration of CO. Marlboro cigarette smoke had a slightly lower CO concentration, and Camel cigarette smoke contained the lowest concentration of CO. It was also surprising to find out that ‘light’ cigarette smoke had practically the same CO concentration as regular cigarette smoke. In fact, in the case of Marlboro cigarette smoke, Marlboro Light cigarette smoke had a slightly higher CO concentration than Marlboro Red cigarette smoke.

I was only able to test one type of unfiltered cigarette smoke, Camel Unfiltered, and determined that unfiltered cigarette smoke contains the highest concentration of CO (in comparison to other types of cigarette smoke of the same brand). Of course, this conclusion was based upon the result of only one type of unfiltered cigarette smoke, so take it with a grain of salt.

Virginia Slims and Marlboro cigarettes are both manufactured by Phillip Morris, which explains why both brands of cigarette smoke had similar results. Camel cigarettes are manufactured by RJ Reynolds and apparently use a blend of Turkish tobacco, which could explain why their smoke has such a low CO concentration.

However, I must admit that there could be a great amount of error in my results. As you can see from the graphical representation of my results, there was quite a large spread of experimentally determined CO concentrations for each type of cigarette smoke. Tobacco is a natural plant, so no two cigarettes are the same. It’s possible that a cigarette I sampled just happened to produce an extraordinary large or tiny amount of CO gas.

Nevertheless, I’m confident that my results paint a somewhat accurate picture of the CO content in cigarette smoke. One interesting tidbit is that, for the most part, the CO concentration in cigarette smoke is substantially greater than the CO concentration in the exhaust of most modern cars. If that’s not enough to scare cigarette smokes, keep in mind that cigarette smoke contains plenty of other nasty chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and arsenic. And oh yeah, it coats your lungs with this nasty ‘tar’ that I couldn’t even remove with 15 M hydrochloric acid (stomach acid)…