Dr. John Legge
speaker
108 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Dr. John Legge’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There are a number of almost conflicting cases for just how much.
is in the community i know industry groups and studies that have been commissioned by tobacco industry groups they say that it could be as much as a third of our total tobacco consumption is now illicit that's disputed by groups like ash and that's one of the things that we don't really have a clear gauge on because of course these illicit retailers aren't putting their hands up and going yes i'm gonna i'm selling this and who trusts tobacco companies anymore
Exactly.
Yeah.
So I gave three samples of cigarettes to the University of Auckland's Centre for Electron Microscopy and Material Sciences.
That was a legitimate packet of Chesterfield Blue, which had the health warnings on it.
That one was about $30.
And then I gave them two samples of black market tobacco, a packet of Double Happiness and a packet of the Hongta Shan cigarettes.
And those ones were
The double happiness was about 20 or so dollars, I believe, and the Hongta Shan was the $15 one that I picked up earlier.
And the results were really interesting.
The researchers who were working the electron microscope, they're able to zoom in at the tiny, tiny level and they're able to pick out.
The elemental makeup, which was really interesting to see.
You pull up these images and it's almost like a web or a little universe of different strands and the crystalline resins and bits and pieces that are...
It's really interesting, yeah.
What we did from there, we took it to another professor at Auckland University, a professor of organic and medicinal chemistry, David Barker, who was able to sort of refine those results and give us various levels for what was inside the cigarettes.
And that was the really surprising results there.
One of the things that we wanted to make clear as well in our reporting was that
Cigarettes are terrible for you, full stop.
A lot of these harmful materials, they were in the legitimate cigarettes as well, just at much lower levels.
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