One-pack-a-day Kent smokers were inhaling over a billion clumps of asbestos fibers per year(1998)

Take for instance, Kent cigarettes’ Micronite filter, which was fully one-third asbestos. When Kent maker Lorillard introduced the filter in the early ’50s, the company gave it the zippy moniker, ”The Thinking Man’s Filter.“ A few years later, when it was discovered that asbestos causes cancer, Lorillard commissioned a pair of electron microscope studies to prove that Kent smokers weren’t sucking in asbestos along with their buttsmoke. The results: One-pack-a-day Kent smokers were inhaling over a billion clumps of asbestos fibers per year.