Today, despite studies indicating the perils of being a smoker, various cancers being investigated in relation to smoking, we still live in a world where, planes and restaurants have smoking and no-smoking zones. The right to smoke is scrupulously honored. The right to provide safe, non-trans-fat-containing food to America's children, is debated; and the Olympics, a showpiece of fitness and fineness of body, is has as its official drink, a cola, containing harmful phosphates, and 9 spoons of sugar in one teaspoon.
Nicotine, the main culprit in the cigarettes gets inhaled into our lungs, where most of it sits, while some part of it gets into our brain in like 10 seconds, and gets dispersed throughout the body in 20 seconds. While nicotine by itself is fairly bad for you in the sense that it increases your risk of heart disease, cigarettes per se, contain carbon monoxide and tar. Tar can play havoc with the lining of your lungs, and carbon-monoxide does its bit in keeping oxygen away , and affecting the artery walls so that all the fat you eat is encouraged to deposit itself there.
So, one way of looking at things is that you are really converting your body plumbing into a sewer system, which continues to get clogged with all the undesirable chemicals you keep pouring in. And yet you have folks going ecstatic over the first puff, inviting all the junk in, and spewing out some more junk in the form of smoke (in an artistic fashion); and all the time science tells us that while the lungs (in their semi destroyed state) still manage to partially cleanse the air you exhale, it still contains some of the poisonous chemicals. And so we come to passive smoking. Messing up the lives of those around you, by converting yourself into a chimney exuding poisonous fumes.
If you were a factory, you would be fined by the EPA and forced to pay fines, and install pollution control measures. But because you are human, can think, have control over your actions, you have the freedom to be stupid and harmful to those around you.
Anyone with a smoking habit has an increased chance of lung, cervical, and other types of cancer; respiratory diseases such as emphysema, asthma, and chronic bronchitis; and cardiovascular disease, such as heart attack, high blood pressure, stroke, and atherosclerosis (narrowing and hardening of the arteries). The risk of stroke is especially high in women who take birth control pills.
Smoking can damage fertility, making it harder to conceive, and it can interfere with the growth of the fetus during pregnancy. It accounts for an estimated 14% of premature births and 10% of infant deaths. There is some evidence that smoking may cause impotence in some men.
Smokers are likely to exhibit a variety of symptoms that reveal the damage caused by smoking. A nagging morning cough may be one sign of a tobacco habit. Other symptoms include shortness of breath, wheezing, and frequent occurrences of respiratory illness, such as bronchitis, poor circulation, with cold hands and feet and premature wrinkles.. Smoking also increases fatigue and decreases the smoker's sense of smell and taste.
Sometimes the illnesses that result from smoking come on silently with little warning. For instance, coronary artery disease may exhibit few or no symptoms. At other times, there will be warning signs, such as bloody discharge from a woman's vagina, a sign of cancer of the cervix. Another warning sign is a hacking cough, worse than the usual smoker's cough, that brings up phlegm or blood-a sign of lung can
Countries have passed various legislations to ban smoking in public places. The Surgeon General has decreed that his message be displayed on all cigarette packs and cartons. The tobacco lobby does its stuff in Washington, and cigarettes continue to be widely advertised as a lifestyle thing.
The question is whose life and what style.
Once the going looked like its getting tough at home, the tobacco companies turned to developing countries. They removed some warnings from the packs, and blithely sold the stuff in Africa, Asia, South America and Eastern Europe. And so, today, smokers in Argentina will not see any warning on a box of American cigarettes that smoking causes emphysema or heart disease. Smokers in Kenya will be told even less. American cigarette packs in Kenya do not even warn of the harm to pregnant women, that smoking causes lung cancer, or that quitting might be a good thing to do.
Many countries have now decreed that cigarette packs should carry pictures of people affected with various cancers and sicknesses attributable to smoking and tobacco chewing.
Cigarette packs sold in Canada require that color pictures of blackened lungs, diseased hearts, lip cancers and other tobacco-related diseases be displayed on the cigarette packs.
