Youth Daily, May 26, 2010

Shanghai's Youth Daily does its best to spark another consumer product quality scare with a story showing how smoking certain brands of cigarettes will elevate breathalyser readings.

The paper received a tip from a Shanghai resident who has had a couple of unfortunate experiences with breath testers: once after having just rinsed with mouthwash, and a second time after smoking a cigarette, traffic cops found elevated blood alcohol levels.

The incredulous reporter visited the police to check things out in person, and ended up implying that two brands of cigarettes contain alcohol:

Yesterday morning, with Mr. Li's suspicions in hand, this reporter performed an alcohol test with 555 and Chung Hwa brand cigarettes. After taking a puff of a 555, the traffic cop's handheld alcohol meter registered 0.19 (driving under the influence refers to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.2 mg/mL or above). After a wait of more than ten minutes, a puff of a Chung Hwa registered 0.12, which meant that it contained alcohol as well.

The traffic cop said that the two tests had found alcohol, which meant that the cigarettes contained either alcohol or something very close to alcohol as an ingredient. Still, it did not reach the level of driving drunk, so in such a case, they would not punish the driver. Instead, they would advise the driver to stop the car along the side of the road and find a friend or family member to take over driving. "The test found alcohol, after all, and from a safety standpoint the driver ought to wait a while before driving," the traffic cop said.

Do cigarettes contain alcohol? Yesterday, this reporter consulted tobacco control experts at Ruijin Hospital and Zhongshan Hospital who said they couldn't believe it. In their opinion, alcohol is not added to cigarettes during the manufacturing process. One tobacco expert said that some cigarettes may be stored with alcohol after manufacture to help with preservation, and this may indirectly account for the presence of alcohol in the cigarettes.

The reporter did not check with either cigarette producer, or the manufacture of the breath test device.

According to scads of spam DUI lawyer sites, and other more reputable scientific studies, smoking can interfere with the accuracy of breath tests, so whatever nasty chemicals Chung Hwa and 555 may contain, it's unlikely that the reporter got drunk off of a single puff.