they used to let kids have real fun
There's an xkcd for that :3
Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.
It's always wild to me seeing comments about different toxins like this on information about random things in the past, but it's never discussed when it comes to cigarettes.
Tobacco companies knew that cigarette smoke contained radioactive alpha particles for more than four decades and developed "deep and intimat
Due to the relatively high activity concentrations of 210Po and 210Pb that are found in tobacco and its products, cigarette smoking highly i
Always always begging people who don’t smoke to never start and people who do smoke to quit. Quitting is hard but it’s worth it and there are resources out there to help you quit. It’s very discouraging to see smoking getting glazed with cool factor in the media again, please don’t fall for it!
Reblogging again to add another source, a review of tobacco companies' internal corporate documents and litigation regarding polonium-210. It reaches much of the same conclusions as the UCLA study described in the first link above. Beginning in the 1960s, tobacco companies conducted research into ways to eliminate polonium-210 in tobacco, but refused to publish any of it — even internal studies indicating that there was less PO-210 in tobacco than contemporary studies claimed — because if public awareness about PO-210 was raised, they might buy fewer tobacco products.
The major tobacco manufacturers discovered that polonium was part of tobacco and tobacco smoke more than 40 years ago and attempted, but fai
