Secondhand smoke—which sometime after I stopped taking health class in my public high school began to be called “passive smoke”—is a confirmed risk for the loved ones of smokers. A new study from the Technical University of Braunschweig, in Germany, however, indicates that people aren’t the only ones at risk of absorbing dangerous chemical compounds from nearby smoke. Bizarrely, plants, including crops we eat, can absorb nicotine from cigarette smoke.
The study, published by the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development, is singularly odd. Willing souls smoked 11 cigarettes within a two-hour period inside a greenhouse in which peppermint plants were growing. The plants, said Dirk Selmar, the study’s lead author, appeared at first to be unchanged. “As far as we have seen, there have been no negative effects on the growth,” he wrote in an email. Yet tests for nicotine, conducted at various stages in the plants’ life, found that the plants had “tremendously elevated nicotine levels,” Selmar said.
