Smoking is an age-old art that many partake in regularly. Smoking is a very expensive habit that can cause long-term problems for only a short-term gain of comfort. The surrounding non-smoking socialites must witness, experience, and live with the smoke day in and day out. According to the American Heart Foundation, 43.3 percent of American men and women indulge in tobacco consumption through smoke. The negative effects of the habit-forming substance crush the positive effects. This is on the borderline of an illegal addicting drug, but publicly allowed. Everyone has a right to smoke, but everyone should respect others as well. In cases I have witnessed in my life, the smoker seems to care less about a non-smoker?s wishes before lighting the cancer stick. I am tired of it and I do not like the fact that surrounding smokers change the course of my life.
Second hand smoke, often called passive smoking, is more dangerous than actually performing the act personally. Stated by the American Lung Association, ?Secondhand smoke exposure causes disease and premature death in children and adults who do not smoke. Secondhand smoke contains hundreds of chemicals known to be toxic or carcinogenic, including formaldehyde, benzene, vinyl chloride, arsenic ammonia, and hydrogen cyanide?, and further states, ?Secondhand smoke has been classified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a known cause of cancer in humans (Group A carcinogen).? This is a proven carcinogen that can kill! I personally am not a gambler and I really wish smokers would wise up to consider how many non-smokers dislike their fate controlled by a selfish addict.
Your blood and breathing characteristics become unstable and uncomfortable with exposure to smoke. The smoke is an absence of oxygen, which last I recall, allows us to live. Research from the most current Surgeon General's Report concluded, ?Short exposures to second hand smoke can cause blood platelets to become stickier, damage the lining of blood vessels, decrease coronary flow velocity reserves, and reduce heart rate variability, potentially increasing the risk of heart attack.?
The European Respiratory Society performed a study and found, ?Recent research from Finland has shown that passive smoking plays a role in the development of adult asthma. Researchers found that subjects exposed to tobacco smoke in the workplace were twice as likely to develop asthma as those who were not exposed.
The smoking issue is very complicated and some of the arguments are beyond the scope of this essay. Still, we can obtain a balanced outlook if we consider the following: the facts of smoking, individual right, societal responsibility, and the stigma of smoking. Haviland and King write essays which contain very important points, but seem to contain a bias which may alienate some people. To truly reach a consensus on the smoking issue, we must be willing to meet each other halfway. We must strike equilibrium between individual right and societal responsibility.
The first main point in the article discusses the health issues associated with smoking to non-smokers and smokers. According to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), smoking causes cancer and heart disease, and other illnesses among smokers. Furthermore, a non-smoker is affected by smoking with the same conditions. Secondhand smoke enhances asthma, bronchitis, or allergic disorders among individuals.
Smoking can cause many lung and heart diseases as well as many forms of cancer.
Smoking cigarettes have negative effects on not only the people who smoke, but also the people around them and the environment. Smoking cigarettes lead to many diseases and negative health effects, such as lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease. Second hand smoke can lead to the same side effects. However, the dangers of second hand smoke tend to be generally greater than that of first hand smoke, which is what the smoker inhales.
Smoking tobacco in the cigarette form was extremely popular in the early part of the 20th century. Many people joined in the popular habit, got addicted, and had no fear of the future consequences or health concerns. Many people were under the impression that smoking was good for their bodies, and were unaware of the unhealthy side affects that cigarette smoking caused. Some famous people like Walt Disney, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth all were killed from their love of tobacco. Soon enough more and more cases of lung, throat, and mouth cancers began popping up all over the place, but people were reluctant to blame their beloved tobacco. It wasn’t until 1964 when Surgeon General Luther Terry stated that smoking causes lung cancer in people who smoke and inhale the fumes, that perceptions on smoking began to change. Since the findings of the Surgeon General, there has been an on going battle between pro-smoking, and anti-smoking groups over the rights of smokers. As the non smoking movement is growing at a rapid pace, and smoking bans have been ruled to not violate the 1st Amendment. In the last decade we have banned smoking in almost all public areas from bars and restaurants, offices, malls, and living quarters. The smoking bans are one effective way to abolish smoking, but it fails to address the major component in smoking; addiction to nicotine, and the psychological effect it has on users. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to end smoking. This is because treatment plans have such a small level of success. Medical treatment such as prescription medication often have more side effects than positive effects for the user. But one product has been making huge gains in the fight to quit tobacco, and that is the electronic cigarette...
Smoking is a lifestyle, a habit, and a trend. Smoking has become a social activity among teens, connecting them through the craving of a smoke. Smoking is seen as seductive and cool in the media and movies which influences teenagers to smoke even more. The World Health Organization has stated that “Tobacco kills around 6 million people each year. More than 5 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while more than 600,000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.” As of April 2016, only 7% of teenagers in the U.S. smoke, but it is said that tobacco use will kill 8 million people annually by 2030. 99% of adult smokers start in their years as teenagers. Smoking is an epidemic that has taken control of people’s lives since 1881 and the media since the early 1900s. Smoking currently kills about 440,000 people a year in the U.S. I feel that it is an issue because it is the #1 most preventable way to die, but people still continue to smoke because of how it looks and how they are perceived as a person if they do. The fact that people become addicted to a trend that will attribute to their death for the sake of being thought of as cooler, is a problem that needs to be addressed.
Smoking is not only affect for the smoker’s health, but also others around the smoker. People who do not smoke are affect just as much as those who are smoking. Which is due to second hand smoke, as the toxin smoke release in the air. Second hand smoke is harmful to non- smoker and causes more damage to their lung from breathing it. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “When a nonsmoker breathes in secondhand smoke, the body begins to metabolize or break down the nicotine that was in the smoke. During this process, a nicotine byproduct called cotinine is created. Exposure to nicotine and secondhand smoke can be measured by testing saliva, urine, or blood for the presence of cotinine.” According to "Surgeon General Adds To List of Smoking's Harms." “About 20.8 million people in the U.S. have died from smoking-related diseases since then, a toll the report puts at 10 times the number of Americans who have died in all of the nation's wars combined. M...
Second-hand smoke can also cause a variety of seriously, deadly aliments. Every year more than 3,000 deaths from lung cancer and 35,000-62,000 deaths from heart attack and respiratory tract infections are caused from breathing in second-hand smoke (“Cigarette Smoking” 2). Second-hand smoke only takes ten minutes to begin damaging the heart. Ten minutes isn't a lot of time for the amount of damage second-hand smoke can cause. In that ten minutes spent around smoke, the smell sinks into the fabric of clothes. The smell will then stay in the fabrics and other people will inhale it, including children.
Experiencing the death of a loved one is never easy, especially when the cause is something self-inflicted, such as cigarettes. Imagine if that loved one was your parent or even worse, your own child. Now, imagine watching the demise and physical incapacities that transpire while you see them deteriorate right in front of you. Feel the anger that would coarse through your veins if you were to see an add that glamorized such deadly instruments, particularly once you realize that the areas being marketed are lower class. Cigarettes are legal killers that cripple many individuals and families alike. They are a highly addictive substance that benefit no one. I am against cigarettes in every capacity as I have dealt with the effects of it on a personal level. Cigarettes leave a distaste in the mouth literally and figuratively. I am also a firm believer that
Asthmatic children are especially at risk. Exposure to secondhand smoke increases the number of episodes and severity of symptoms in hundreds of thousands of asthmatic children. Between 200,000 and 1,000,000 asthmatic children have their condition worsened by secondhand smoke.
Every year, there are over 400,000 smoking-related deaths in the United States. A large percentage of these are due to lung cancer, whose leading cause is smoking. However, not all deaths are smokers themselves. Anyone in the vicinity can fall victim to second hand smoke. These people, through no action of their own, can have their lives threatened.
Smoking can negatively affect your system in just a few days, and over time, smokers rarely think about the greater dangers, such as lung cancer, skin cancer, and birth defects. Although I don't smoke, I am still aware of these dangers and try to keep myself away from situations where I am surrounded by smoke. The majority of people don't know that breathing in second-hand smoke is actually worse than smoking a cigarette. People who are constantly surrounded by smokers in places such as bars and restaurants are affected by the smoke they breathe in. While people assume that inhaling smoke straight from the cigarette is worse than secondhand smoke, they forget that the smoker has a filter that holds back some of the toxins that people around them can easily breathe in.
Second Hand Smoke In the 1950's and 60's scientists gave the people a lot of evidence on the deadly effects of smoking where the tobacco companies on the other hand tried to put the doubt in people’s minds through the campaigns to show that it is not all true. By the time people actually decided to take care of their health and finally saw how life-threatening smoking could be by real life examples, the tobacco companies already got rich from its sales. Nowadays, nobody doubts that “firsthand” smoke is deadly to your health and it causes lung cancer and heart disease in adults and asthma and bronchitis in children. Now the industry is onto the secondhand smoke. Scientists and researchers are representing a lot of evidence and research that has been done throughout the years showing that the secondhand smoke can also cause a lung cancer in nonsmokers. The study has been done of people who have been long exposed to secondhand smoke and it shows that 26 out of 33 published studies indicate a link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. The study estimates that the people that were breathing secondhand smoke were 8 to 150 percent more likely to get lung cancer. The tobacco companies are trying to argue the facts and are still in serious debate about the health hazards of breathing a secondhand smoke. A lot of anti-smoking organizations are trying to turn smoking in public into a private activity that does not have to involve nonsmokers breathing secondhand smoke. What is even more important is that many of these organizations convinced a lot of smokers to cut back or quit completely. The problem of secondhand smoke is increasing because it is so common in our society. It makes secondhand smoke the third-ranking cause of lung cancer among nonsmokers. Mothers who live with a smoking spouse have to realize the ill effects of secondhand smoke on children even before they are born. The smoking components reach the developing fetus through the mother. Infants that are born in a smoking environment weigh less and have a weaker chance of becoming a fully developed child. Secondhand smoke leads to blood clots and damages arterial linings which are the two most leading factors in the development of heart disease. The tobacco companies got scared of the effect that the secondhand smoke research can do to the cigarette makers.
has been found that second-hand smoke from cigarettes causes much harm. to non-smokers. Now after years of study, it is known that in America, Someone is more likely to die from second-hand smoke than from a car. gun or AID's. Cigarette smoke causes cancer, heart disease and it.
Secondhand smoke, we have all heard of it and know at least one person that smokes. Throughout the history of smoking, many researchers have found that secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the actual smoking of cigarettes. Many people know that there are dangers to smoking and secondhand smoke, but many tend to avoid the advice given to them. Secondhand smoke is very harmful to people of all ages. It destroys the inside and outside of one’s body. Secondhand smoke is not only dangerous indoors but as well as outdoors. On average every year there are many death results found. As humans should want to live a healthier life and come together to prevent smoking in the future.