The Health Risks of Smoking Cigarettes

The Health Risks of Smoking

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 e...

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...all the ingredients as mainstream smoke and is just as deadly.

Smoking is everywhere and will continue to be all around us. We can ignore it or take action. One less person smoking means that there is that much less smoke in the air. With all the new smokers, a plan has to be set in place, either creating more ads or finding accurate facts. Unless smoking dissolves from the face of the earth, there will still be people “killing themselves.” Since smoking causes lung cancer, bad after effects and other problems, the need for elimination is even higher. If you smoke than you probably know it is hard to quit, but with the right resources and the motivation to quit, the United States will be a more “breathable” place to live.

Citations

Anonymous. More about second hand smoke. 2004. 11/02/04. .

Anonymous. Secondhand Smoke. 2004. 11/02/04. .

Anonymous. Tobacco and Smoking. Ed. Bruno Leone. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc. , 1998.

Grannis, MD, Frederic W.. The Lung Cancer and Cigarette Smoking Web Page. 2004. 10/28/04. .

Martin, Terry. Global Smoking Statistics. About.com. 2002. 11/01/04. .

Torr, James D. Smoking. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc. , 2001.