Persuasive Essay On Tobacco

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Tobacco is Americas worst legal drug. Tobacco has been present in the United States, before and after its founding. It was most popularly consumed in the same fashion as it is done today; through smoking. After the Civil War ended, it became extremely popular in America because of its addictive content; nicotine. It swept across the nation, and it was soon to be industrialized. During the twentieth century, business men saw a brilliant opportunity to make a lot of money. Seizing this opportunity, they wanted to improve the quality of their cigarettes so that their product could rival traditionally rolled cigarettes. Businessmen also wanted to process and manufacture tobacco as efficiently as possible. To complete this cost effective plan and …show more content…

According to the CDC, this burden continues to rise, with approximately one hundred and ninety three billion dollars spent annually in the United States; ninety seven billion from lost productivity and ninety six billion due to smoking-related health care costs. The Society of Actuaries reported in 2006, which is the latest data available, that secondhand smoke costs the U.S. around ten-billion dollars a year: about five billion in medical costs associated with secondhand smoke and four billion, six hundred million in lost wages. Smoking not only puts a hole in a smokers pocket but also in the non-smoking tax payers pocket …show more content…

The government would loose all of its tax revenue, which is about six billion, one hundred and thirty-six million, seventy-five thousand dollars annually, as is compared to one hundred and ninety three billion dollars spent on the effects caused by smoking because of its existence in the United States. This would require other taxes to be decreased not increased! Maybe even this left over money from banning smoking could go towards rehabilitation centers to help people get over their addiction. Yes, a black market would emerge, but it would also emerge if taxes were increased on cigarettes too. The overall goal of banning smoking, is to squelch it. The process of squelching smoking won 't happen over night, but rather over a generation. If smoking were illegal, a lot of people would be deterred from smoking due to it being illegal. As the people who continue to smoke illegally die off, the next generation of people will look upon smoking as a drug that degrades you both mentally and physically, ultimately getting rid of it. People might say well then how come this didn 't happen to marijuana, simply because the mental and physical effects that are used to argue against marijuana are incomparable to those of cigarettes.

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