"Eye Technology, Inc. (OTC: EYTC) and Star Tobacco & Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ("Star"), EYTC's wholly owned subsidiary today announced that the company had received a purchase order for approximately 1.2 million pounds of its Star cured tobacco which will be treated by its novel, high speed and patented curing technology for the removal of all, or virtually all, of the tobacco specific nitrosamines ("TSNA's")."

As interesting as this news can be, several distorted perceptions need to be addressed.

First, let us examine the following statement of the article: "Tobacco specific nitrosamines are among the most powerful and abundant carcinogens in tobacco and in second hand smoke." The sentence makes it sound like: "there is a lot of this stuff". In reality, the quantities are infinitesimally small -- especially where secondhand smoke is concerned. So small in fact, their presence must be often inferred by mathematical calculation, for it cannot be measured directly. The amount of powerful carcinogens in the cities' everyday atmosphere is quite higher, but everybody rushes to forbid smoking indoors, while large amounts of outside air are pumped indoors by air conditioning systems. So goes the anti-tobacco hysteria.

Second, it must be known that nitrosamines are carcinogenic in some animals -- but not in all -- and at any rate a huge dosage is necessary before cancer may develop in certain animals. This dosage is far higher to the intake of heavy smokers when proportioned to human weight. So far, no epidemiological study has been unable to establish a link between human cancer and nitrosamines -- even using all the "creativity" anti-tobacco-paid scientists are well-known to be capable of.

Third, nitrosamines in tobacco and smoke are coming from nicotine during the leaf curing process, and mainly during combustion.

Since the process mentioned by the article does not remove nicotine, it is hard to conceive how much of the nitrosamines is actually removed.

The only possible ways to actually remove all nitrosamines are to either remove nicotine (and in this case the resulting product is no longer tobacco), or to replace nicotine with some new catalyst to prevent the formation of nitrosamines.

But if a new catalyst is introduced, nobody knows what the presence of a new activator may do to health (for real, this time).

We cannot exclude a priori the effectiveness of this new technology, for no further information is available. And though the risks of smoking are actually quite limited when all the nonsense, propaganda and scientific falsifications are removed, we would be only too happy to see them even more reduced.

But we are quite skeptical about the ability of technology to outdo the work of nature. And when it comes to today's anti-tobacco garbage, extreme caution is the only way to go -- especially when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry.