onsist of finely shredded tobacco enclosed in a paper wrapper, and they often have a filter tip at the end. They are frequently shorter and narrower than cigars. In pre-Columbian times, indigenous peoples of the West Indies and of parts of Central and South America smoked tobacco and other plant produces in a similar form. Spanish explorers to the Americas introduced the cigar to Spain by the late 1500s, whence it spread to other European countries. Most cigars have been made by machine since about 1902; cigarettes, since the last quarter of the 19th cent. The cigarette industry increased phenomenally in the 20th cent., especially after World War I. The composition of cigarettes in the United States has changed. Imported Turkish tobacco was favored at one time, but the tobacco of Virginia is more popular today.Cigarette producers in the United States were faced with serious legal and financial threats in the mid- and late 1990s as a result of health-related lawsuits brought by U.S. states and by individuals, and also were confronted with further attempts at government regulation. Disputes with the states were settled in 1998 when the industry agreed to pay 46 states $206 billion over 25 years (four states had earlier been paid a total of $40 billion to resolve their separate lawsuits), but individuals continued to seek damages for illnesses that they maintained were caused by smoking cigarettes. Where U.S. law allows, cigarettes continue to be aggressively marketed by American tobacco companies, who also aim increasing amounts of their sales efforts at the less regulated nations in the global market. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which came into affect in 2005 and has been ratified by more than 55 nations, seeks to reduce the number of tobacco-related illnesses and deaths by such measures as banning tobacco product advertising and putting warning labels on tobacco packaging.
How are cigars different from cigarettes?
A cigar is defined, for tax purposes, as "any roll of tobacco wrapped in leaf tobacco or in any substance containing tobacco," while a cigarette is "any roll of tobacco wrapped in paper or any substance not containing tobacco." Unlike most machine-made cigarettes, cigars do not usually have a filter.
Most cigars are made up of a single type of air-cured or dried tobacco. Cigar tobacco leaves are first aged for about a year and then fermented in a multi-step process that can take from 3 to 5 months. Fermentation causes chemical and bacterial reactions that change the tobacco. This is what gives cigars a different taste and smell from cigarettes.
Cigars come in many sizes, some as small as a cigarette (called a cigarillo), others much larger. Large cigars may contain between 5 and 17 grams of tobacco. There are about 29 grams in an ounce, so a very large cigar can contain more than half an ounce of tobacco. This is as much tobacco as a whole pack of cigarettes. Large cigars can take between 1 to 2 hours to smoke.
To blur the line between cigars and cigarettes, there are now cigarillos ("little cigars") that are the same size and shape of cigarettes. Many have filters. Other than the fact that they are brown, they look just like cigarettes, though some are just a bit larger. Studies suggest that many people treat them like cigarettes -- inhaling and smoking them every day.
