Smoking: Good or Bad

According to Global Smoking Statistics, 80,000 and 100,000 youths start smoking everyday. Smoking is everywhere, in shops, restaurants and malls. Smoking can be controlled if the right steps are taken. If you walked around downtown Fort Collins, the odds are good that you will encounter a smoker. The negative effects of smoking outweigh the positive effects of smoking yet people still do it. There are ways to quit that can make your life better if you smoke.

Smoking goes back to 1492 when Christopher Columbus first stepped onto the plains of the new world. Native Americans chewed and inhaled a specific type of leaf, using a "toboca" pipe to inhale the foreign leaf. It soon became a treasure for the Europeans, after Christopher discovered this new creation. Cigarettes did not become popular until the 1880s, nor were they available. People just used pipes and cigars. When, according to Smoking, James B. Duke developed a way to mass produce cigarettes, making them cheaper and milder. This created an increase in popularity and between 1870 and 1890 the usage increased 100 times what is was before.

The health risks of smoking are that it causes Lung cancer and in 1992 there were 161,000 new cases of lung cancer and 143,000 deaths according to Tobacco and Smoking, 1998. The duration and amount smoked determines the risk of getting lung cancer. Men or women who smoke forty cigarettes a day, compared to those who smoke twenty a day, have twice the risk as getting lung cancer. Those who start smoking before 15 are four times more likely to get lung cancer than those who begin after twenty-five. It also causes Cardiovascular Disease. Smokers, male and female, are at a higher risk to get recurrent heart attacks, sudden death from coronary heart disease and myocardial infection than nonsmokers. The increase is two to four times the amount than nonsmokers. Cigarettes cause an addiction. Nicotine is a highly addictive drug. It is the nicotine that is in tobacco that makes cigarettes so addicting. A 1991 editorial in the Lancet, from the book Tobacco and Smoking on page 33 says:

The core of the problem lies in the addictiveness of nicotine. It is nicotine that people cannot easily do without, not tobacco; it is nicotine dependence that slows the progress of existing programmes. As a drug deliver system the modern cigarette is a highly effective device for getting nicotine to the brain, but by pharmaceutical standards it is also a very dirty one, the nicotine being contaminated with the nitrosamines and other carcinogens in the tar, as well as with carbon monoxide and other harmful gases.

Just taking nicotine out of cigarettes would not make them safe, it would just make them non-addictive. New smokers would not become addicted to cigarettes and smokers might stop smoking altogether.

The health risks of smoking to include Lung disease. According to smokinglungs.com, lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer deaths in men and women, while 90% of lung cancer is preventable. There are 2,000 cancer causing materials in a single cigarette. Second hand smoke can cause lung disease but is not as prevalent as smoking straight from the cigarette and still exists. Smoking causes many visual effects including bad breath, yellowed teeth and the smell of smoke lingering around the smoker.

Second hand smoke is also a known cause of deaths in nonsmokers. www.hc-sc.gc.ca clams that "2/3 thirds of cigarette smoke is not inhaled by the user, so that goes to the people around them breathing it. It also has twice the tar and nicotine as the person smoking it." According to the Canadian Cancer Society, "Cigarettes burn for approximately 12 minutes, but smokers usually only inhale for 30 seconds. As a result, cigarettes are spewing second-hand smoke (side stream) smoke into the air for non-smokers to breathe."

Are health risks really accurate? According to Smoking, the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the source of this statistic, over four hundred thousand deaths "are known to be cause by or associated with smoking in adults" (forces.org). "Associated with" simply means "occurs together with." Thus the CDC figure incorporated many deaths that were not necessarily caused by smoking. This means that a person who is overweight, has diabetics and a history of heart attacks and dies from smoking, the CDC claims the death to smoking. In Smoking, he claims that "smoking is a bad habit, not an addiction. Individuals make a conscious choice to smoke or not to smoke." Although nicotine is proven to be and addictive drug, he claims that it is not the nicotine that causes the habit it is the person's choice. If done properly with the right hygiene, bad breath and yellow teeth can be prevented. A smoker needs to brush their teeth regularly and floss. Use mouthwash and if you can find the specific brand proven to control the smoke smell, then use it. Second-hand smoke is not all its made out to be. According to Tobacco and Smoking, the EPA was able to claim only a weak association between second-hand smoke and lung cancer. The risk increase is as low as nineteen