Is it okay to smoke while breastfeeding if you smoke at least 2 hours before nursing?

I used to grow tobacco. Six weeks before harvest, you have to spray a chemical on the plants called MH-30. This chemical is systemic, it is absorbed into the plant and it stays there. It wouldn't work if it didn't. Its job is to stop the tobacco from putting out side shoots, called suckers after topping (breaking off the bloom). The suckers rob the plant of food and cause it to produce smaller, lighter leaves. So that MH-30 stays in the plant.

The MH-30 bottle had a big warning on it that you shouldn't even allow pregnant women in the patch after the plants were sprayed at any time up until harvest because it was so strongly mutagenic and it caused miscarriages.

That was the case when tobacco was mostly being raised in the US. But raising tobacoo was one of those jobs that was outsourced to third world countries since NAFTA. The price supports were removed in this country a few years ago, and almost none is still raised here. So what chemicals do you suppose they might be using on the tobacco now?

After the tobacco is sold to the cigarette companies, they add flame retardants and all sorts of other chemicals to the tobacco to make it burn more slowly. If you ever smoke a Canadian cigarette, you'll find that they burn in a matter of seconds, as the use of those flame retardants isn't allowed there.

When you smoke, all those chemicals not only enter your bloodstream, they also get all over your clothing. I read somewhere that it is more common for children of smokers to have asthma, even if they don't smoke in the house, because of the particulates clinging to the parent's clothing.

None of this means you shouldn't nurse your child. The particulates will still be clinging to your clothing if you bottle feed. It does mean that you should quit.

By the way, I also used to raise bottle calves. I had a cow and a goat that I used to raise two at a time, the rest were fed milk replacer from a bottle. The difference in health between the two groups was so dramatic that I swore I would never feed formula to a child of mine. My cow and goat raised calves were healthy, glossy, muscular and active. My formula raised calves all had the runs, they had dull coats, they were inactive and most of them got pneumonia.