The Health Risks of Smoking

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The Health Risks of Smoking

Every year nearly one in every five US deaths are related to cigarette smoking, that means that every year 440,000 people alone die from cigarettes. Deaths caused by alcohol, car accidents, suicide, AIDS, homicide, and illegal drugs combined are actually less than the number of deaths caused by cigarette smoking. Being the grandchild of a grandpa who died of lung cancer from smoking, I know and understand what cigarette smoking can do.

Tobacco smoke is a mixture of gases and of small particles made up of water, tar, and nicotine. The tar is a mixture of thousands of toxic chemicals, many of which are known to cause cancer. Many of the gases in tobacco smoke are harmful to the human body. These include carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and other toxic irritants such as acrolein and formaldehyde. Due to the high temperatures of over 1400 degrees F, the burning end of a cigarette is like a miniature chemical factory.

Aside from the tar in cigarettes there is also another very potent and harmful carcinogen called Nicotine. Nicotine causes addiction to cigarettes that is similar to the addiction produced by using heroin and cocaine. Almost 80 percent of people who try smoking become addicted and only 1 in 5 smokers who try to quit succeed on the first try. A person can become addicted to nicotine in the first few weeks of trying it. Most people are unaware that nicotine is a psychoactive drug. A psychoactive drug is...

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