Smoking, Aka Deaths' Candy

Smoking, AKA Deaths' Candy

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Smoking cigarettes can do very fatal damages human health (Bender 17). There are over fifty ways of making life miserable through smoking due to illnesses, and more than twenty ways of killing a person ("Action on Smoking and Health" 1). The probability that someone who smokes will develop a major complication in their health is one hundred percent; no matter what, it will happen (Bender 33). Smoking cigarettes or any other drug is the major cause of lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases. These contributions can lead to other types of cancers, birth defects, and childhood respiratory illnesses (Bender 17-19). Along with these major health risks, smokers will loose an estimated twenty-one years of their life ("Action on Smoking and Health" 1). Anybody can be politically correct when they say that nothing but diseases come from smoking; there has been plenty of studies, experiments and test to prove that smoking leads not only to the diseases but the road to death. Making that statement, what good deed could smoking do in our society today?

Studies have shown that people who smoke are at greater risk of developing myocardial infection, recurring heart attacks, and sudden death from heart diseases than people who don't smoke. Smokers also put themselves in a very good position to have a stroke. Chances can be some what detected by the number of cigarettes smoked per day, but it is more likely in younger smokers because their hearts and other body organs are not fully developed yet (Bender 19-20).

All cases of lung cancer reported are almost always linked to people who smoke. This disease does equally affect both men and women. Still the same, lung cancer in women is steadily rising, while in men, it remains steadier. People who start smoking by the age of fifteen are four times more likely to develop lung cancer then a person who does not start smoking till the age of twenty five (Bender 19-20). This is a major problem because more teens are beginning to start smoking at a younger age.

In the United States alone, an estimated three thousand kids under the age of eighteen will start smoking everyday (Start the Dialogue Early, and discuss it Often 1). Worldwide, around eighty thousand to one hundred thousand teens will start smoking not weekly or monthly but this statistic is daily. Of these teens, about fifty percent will go on to smoke for at least the next fifteen to twenty years of their life. These children are going to have a very high chance of developing respiratory problems such as asthma and continuous coughing before they reach the legal age to smoke, eighteen. They will also have a hard time participating on athletic teams because their lung capacity will be affected. Not to mention, they will have yellow teeth, body odor, and be at higher risk for using other drugs, such as alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. The reason kids are influenced to start smoking so young is because of the advertisement all around the media (Overall Stats and Youth Smoking Facts 1-3).

Kids who watch two to four hours of television per day are at a thirty-three percent higher risk for starting to smoke. Most advertisement for cigarettes is controlled in three states; New York, Illinois, and North Carolina. These states house the ten major factories that advertise for cigarettes. Instead of advertising all the major risks that smoking has, they focused most of their attractive ads on cigarettes that seemed less poisonous. First they had filter brands; these ads began to populate when cigarettes were at a decline due to the risk of cancer. As these filtered brands ads began to come into popularity all over television sets and magazines, smoking rates rose higher and higher by the day. After filter brands began to die out, "light" brands began to escalate. This was very popular to people who might have quit because they thought they were not getting as much intake (Hirschfelder 354-355). Because of these two types of cigarettes, consumers were, and still are not properly in formed about the health risks of smoking.

Government warning labels on cigarettes have done anything to try to discourage a person from purchasing those deadly smoking sticks of cancer. The tobacco industry spends four billion dollars per year to promote cigarettes (Hirschfelder 355). These companies have done everything in their power to try and ward people into purchasing cigarettes so they will make a wealthy profit. Manufacturers argue that it is not up to them to lists the "side affects" that come as a result of smoking they argue that it is up to the consumer to find out what they want to know about the health risks that smoking might propose (Bender 154). Because of this, only the bare minimal required