Cigarette? Why not? How about I’ll tell you why? Smoking can be considered one of the most dangerous habits that any one individual can have. Smoking kills an average of 450,000 people each year. More deaths are caused each year by cigarettes and tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus, illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined. So why is it that people still continue to smoke? Although smoking relieves stress and is seen as cool by some, it is also the number 1 cause of death, in other words smoking equals death and/or bad health.
What causes people to even want to smoke knowing the deadly effects? You may have noticed that you are not allowed to smoke in public places, no matter where you live. In fact, your local or city government probably passed a public smoking ban. Of course, this raised the ire of smokers, but for the non-smoker is was like a breath of fresh air. Many people feel the need and believe it is their right to be in a public place without having to breathe the dangerous cigarette smoke. Generally speaking there is no one real reason that causes people to smoke.
There are actually more than a few reasons that scientists believe is the cause for smoking. Some people may start smoking because they saw someone that they liked smoking and thought it was cool. Experimenting with friends is another reason one some people may smoke. In the 1930’s and 1940’s the people were told that smoking was good for you and that cigarettes wouldn’t harm you. After many generations of smoking because of that false allegation leads to more and more people smoking. If a person grows up in an environment where those all around them smoke, they are more likely to smoke as well.
There are many reasons that may cause an individual to smoke but only the smoker can explain why he or she started to smoke. What exactly are the effects of smoking besides addiction and ultimately death? Smoking causes more diseases that have ever been investigated in biomedical research. Smoking is dangerous for a number of reasons. People who smoke contract heart disease, stroke, lung disease, emphysema, impotence, asthma and a wide variety of other diseases. Why does smoking cause all these ailments? And why do people get hooked so easily?
The reason is what the cigarette is made of, the leaves of the tobacco plant are picked, dried, chopped up, and rolled into paper tubes containing nicotine. The tubes are then stuck into the mouth, lit, and the poison-laden smoke is taken into the lungs. Each time a person smokes a cigarette, they take an average of five minutes off their life. This is about the same time it takes to smoke the cigarette. Smoking cigarettes causes hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. The nicotine in tobacco produces a craving. It is not definitely known why, but it is likely that nicotine affects the parts of the brain called pleasure centers.
These are very small areas that are active during pleasant sensations. Smokers seem to give themselves pleasure by taking nicotine into the body where it is passed onto the brain’s pleasure centers. Unfortunately, the feeling of pleasure is very short lived. After smoking, half of the nicotine taken in is gone within half an hour. As the nicotine level drops, the smoker begins to feel worse and a new craving for nicotine is initiated. The body also develops a tolerance to the nicotine. This requires more of it to reach the same levels of satisfaction or pleasure. Herein starts the vicious cycle of need and craving known as addiction.
Lung cancer alone causes 27% of the deaths in smokers. Lung cancer may not appear immediately after an individual starts smoking. It may take years for lung cancer, or any other cancer to appear in one’s body after smoking, People with lung cancer may be eligible to try chemotherapy and other treatments to stop the cancer from growing; however, lung cancer is still the number one killer in smokers. Heart disease causes about 24% of the deaths from smoking, emphysema causes about 23% of the deaths in smokers and the remaining 26% is caused by a variety of other diseases.
Smoking is the most dangerous, physiologically damaging substances used by man. In the final analysis, smoking is an element of stress/peer pressure along with nicotine and effects the body by causing death and/or bad health. Generally speaking there is no one real reason that causes people to smoke. There are actually more than a few reasons that scientists believe is the cause for smoking. Smoking causes heart disease, stroke, lung disease, emphysema, impotence, asthma and a wide variety of other diseases. Those diseases lead to death and/or bad health, thus smoking is a bad habit.
