Smoking; Death in a Stick

It's common knowledge that smoking is harmful, yet millions of people still decide to light one up two to three times a day. Smoking has many detrimental effects such as lung cancer, shorter lifetime, emphysema, bronchitis, heart failure and lung failure. In addition to physical harm, smoking can seriously damage your social life. This is because most non-smokers don't enjoy the company of someone that is smoking. Also, smokers tend to worry consistently about their breath and the smell of their fingernails. For some people, this becomes a part of life as they try to make sure that people do not notice that they've been smoking. These are just a few of the many consequences of smoking cigarettes.

Most smokers get their first drag at very early ages. Somewhere around 80% of adults begin to smoke as teenagers and many of them go on to become chain smokers, as stated in Health Canada.

It seems that the more than 4000 chemicals in a cigarette can't do any more harm than what they're doing to the smoker, and this is where many people go wrong. Picture a teenager smoking a cigarette outside the entrance of a mall and a man comes and stands, idly, relatively close to him for about ten minutes. When he leaves, the man will have walked away with about as many toxicants in his body as the teenager that was directly smoking the cigarette. This is called secondhand smoke and it harms everyone in the surrounding area of where a cigarette is lit.

Secondhand smoke, by definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means "tobacco smoke that is exhaled by smokers or is given off by burning tobacco and is inhaled by persons nearby." Secondhand smoke is now considered a carcinogenic, "which is a substance or agent causing cancer." This means that secondhand smoke is as dangerous as actually smoking the cigarette. The worst case of secondhand smoke involves parents smoking in a house with children. Those kids have no choice but to stay in the house and inhale 250 deadly chemicals, even if the smoke hangs in the air almost as if it belonged there. Children shouldn't have to be tortured, even killed, in this way. Although, it's not just children that suffer from secondhand smoke; an entire family is affected if just one person in the family smokes. There have been cases where many non-smoking members of a family begin having problems with their lungs, heart or kidney just because there is a smoker in the house.

In short, smoking doesn't just hurt your lungs, heart and kidneys; it hurts the lungs, hearts and kidneys of everyone you smoke around. Even when you step outside to take a drag, you should think about the people standing around you and how they feel or might be affected by it. So, when you are weighing the pros and cons of quitting smoking, make sure you add in that your entire family will benefit greatly if you quit.