A Hazard to the World

As you're reading this, you may be drinking coffee and having your morning cigarette. You feel the warmth of the smoke flow through your body and the burst of nicotine sends you soaring. What you don't realize is that the smoke you love is clouding your insides; that nicotine you crave so much is clinging to your organs. Every time you inhale, you take another step closer to death.

Smoking has more than fifty ways of making life a misery through illness and more than twenty ways of killing you. Just a few types of cancer caused by smoking are: lung, upper respiratory, esophagus, bladder, kidney, stomach and pancreas. About 84 percent of those diagnosed with lung cancer from smoking die, 66 percent from upper respiratory cancer, 68 percent from esophagus cancer, 37 percent from bladder cancer, 27 percent from kidney cancer, 26 percent from stomach cancer and 23 percent from pancreas cancer. As a smoker, your chances of catching influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis and many other fatal infections are a great deal higher than those of non-smokers. Many other "minor" infirmities amplified by smoking include the following: gum disease, back pain, cataract, depression, diabetes, hearing loss, muscle pain, psoriasis, stomach ulcer, tooth loss and many more. The list of consequences when you smoke just goes on and on; to fully cover them all would take hours.

Now maybe you're thinking that it's your body and you'll do what you want with it, but you smoking doesn't only harm you, it harms others around you as well. Only half of the smoke is inhaled, the other half floats around in the air. Second hand smoke plays a part in more health problems than you might realize. This is why smoking bans are in place; no one should be forced to breathe air that is polluted with cigarette smoke. About 3,000 people