The Problem of Smoking

Why is Smoking Dangerous?

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Everybody knows that smoking is dangerous. Smoking can damage our body, For Example, your lungs, your brain, and your heart. The poisonous chemicals in a cigarette can cause death. Think about this, if you smoke you won't be able to run fast or jump as high if you can't breathe properly. Another problem is that you can get addicted easily by one of the chemicals called Nicotine. Nicotine can make you feel hyper sometimes. The more you smoke, the more you want to continue to smoke. Your body becomes physically dependent on the drug and begins to crave it.

Major diseases caused by smoking

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Smoking affects how long you live

Research has shown that smoking reduces life expectancy by seven to eight years.

Did you know?

On average, each cigarette shortens a smoker's life by around 11 minutes.

Of the 300 people who die every day in the UK as a result of smoking, many are comparatively young smokers.
The number of people under the age of 70 who die from smoking-related diseases exceeds the total figure for deaths caused by breast cancer, AIDS, traffic accidents and drug addiction.
Non-smokers and ex-smokers can also look forward to a healthier old age than smokers.

Cardiovascular disease
Cardiovascular disease is the main cause of death due to smoking.
Hardening of the arteries is a process that develops over years, when cholesterol and other fats deposit in the arteries, leaving them narrow, blocked or rigid. When the arteries narrow (atherosclerosis), blood clots are likely to form.
Smoking accelerates the hardening and narrowing process in your arteries: it starts earlier and blood clots are two to four times more likely.
Cardiovasular disease can take many forms depending on which blood vessels are involved, and all of them are more common in people who smoke.

A fatal disease

Blood clots in the heart and brain are the most common causes of sudden death.

Coronary thrombosis: a blood clot in the arteries supplying the heart, which can lead to a heart attack. Around 30 per cent are caused by smoking.

Cerebral thrombosis: the vessels to the brain can become blocked, which can lead to collapse, stroke and paralysis. Damage to the brain's blood supply is also an important cause of dementia.

If the kidney arteries are affected, then high blood pressure or kidney failure results.

Blockage to the vascular supply to the legs may lead to gangrene and amputation.

Smokers tend to develop coronary thrombosis 10 years earlier than non-smokers, and make up 9 out of 10 heart bypass patients.

Smoking – health risks

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Cigarettes contain more than 4000 chemical compounds and at least 400 toxic substances.

You can eat five portions of fruit or veg a day and exercise regularly – but healthy behaviour means little if you continue to smoke.

The message that 'smoking is bad for you' is an old one, so not everyone gives it their full attention.
Below we list the health risks of smoking.

Why quit smoking?

Most people know that smoking can cause lung cancer, but it can also cause many other cancers and illnesses.
Smoking directly causes over 100,000 deaths in the UK each year and contributes to many more.
Of these deaths, about 42,800 are from smoking-related cancers, 30,600 from cardiovascular disease and 29,100 die slowly from emphysema and other chronic lung diseases.

How do cigarettes damage health?

Term watch

‘Cardiovascular’ means the heart and circulation.
Cardiovascular disease causes:

poor circulation
angina (chest pains)
heart attacks
stroke.

Cigarettes contain more than 4000 chemical compounds and at least 400 toxic substances.
When you inhale, a cigarette burns at 700°C at the tip and around 60°C in the core. This heat breaks down the tobacco to produce various toxins.
As a cigarette burns, the residues are concentrated towards the butt.
The products that are most damaging are:

tar, a carcinogen (substance that causes cancer)
nicotine is addictive and increases cholesterol levels in your body
carbon monoxide reduces oxygen in the body
components of the gas and particulate phases cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD).

The damage caused by smoking is influenced by:

the number of cigarettes smoked
whether the cigarette has a filter
how the tobacco has been prepared.

Smoking Tobacco

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When your parents were young, people could buy cigarettes and smoke pretty much anywhere — even in hospitals! Ads for cigarettes were all over the place. Today we're more aware about how bad smoking is for our health. Smoking is restricted or banned in almost all public places and cigarette companies are no longer allowed to advertise on TV, radio, and in many magazines.
Almost everyone knows that smoking causes cancer, emphysema, and heart disease; that it can shorten your life by 10 years or more; and that the habit can cost a smoker thousands of dollars a year. So how come people are still lighting up? The answer, in a word, is addiction.

Once You Start, It's Hard to Stop

Smoking is a hard habit to break because tobacco contains nicotine, which is highly addictive. Like heroin or other addictive drugs, the body and mind quickly become so used to the nicotine in cigarettes that a person needs to have it just to feel normal.

People start smoking for a variety of different reasons. Some think it looks cool. Others start because their family members or friends smoke. Statistics show that about 9 out of 10 tobacco users start before they're 18 years old. Most adults who started smoking in their teens never expected to become addicted. That's why people say it's just so much easier to not start smoking at all.

Why is Smoking a Problem?

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Cigarette smoking, the chief avoidable cause of premature death in this country, is responsible for more than 300,000 premature deaths each year. (Letter from Otis Bowen, Secretary of Health and Human Services, to President George Bush, May 3, 1988)
Smoking is an avoidable cause of death. The way to avoid it? Quit smoking. But people can't quit because it's too hard -- because smoking is addictive. In 1988 the Surgeon General issued a report entitled Nicotine Addiction. Throughout its 600+ pages he gives a highly detailed explanation of just why nicotine is addictive.
(Flash Surgeon General warning) The Surgeon General listed criteria for establishing a drug as addictive and showed how nicotine adheres to these criteria. The following are some of those criteria for determining that a drug is addictive (all information is based on US Department of Health and Human Services. The Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction: A Report of the Surgeon General 1988.):
Users develop a compulsive use of the drug despite damage to individual or society. Smoking causes lung cancer, other cancers, chronic obstructive lung disease, heart disease, complications of pregnancy, and several other adverse health effects. Smoking has been associated with antiestrogenic effects such as earlier menopause and increased osteoporosis. Nicotine is known to enter the amniotic fluid, umbilical cord of the fetus, and the breast milk of expectant mothers. Despite these known negative effects of smoking, people continue using cigarettes.
The drug is rewarding and drug seeking takes superiority over other important priorities. In a study by Henningfield, Miyasato, Jasinshki (1985) nicotine was seen to act as a euphoriant and at high doses acted similar to stimulants such as cocaine or amphetamines. Nicotine has been seen to produce other desirable effects as well. It is possible that nicotine improves attention, however most studies in this area compare smokers smoking to smokers not smoking, thus it is unsure whether smoking enhances attention or abstinence for someone who regularly smokes impairs attention. Due to a wide range of results, studies have not been able to conclusively show that smoking improves learning or memory; nonetheless, many smokers claim it does both. They also assert that smoking is relaxing and causes pleasurable feelings. Indeed studies have associated the onset of smoking during the teenage years with high levels of stress present at this time. Because smokers believe smoking to cause all of these beneficial effects, smokers will often stop what they are doing to take breaks for smoking in order to maintain the nicotine level to which their body has grown accustomed.
The drug produces changes in a person’s mood that are mainly controlled by effects in the brain. When a smoker inhales, tobacco smoke reaches the lungs and absorbs rapidly because of the huge surface area. From here the nicotine enters the blood. Nicotine concentration in the blood rises quickly and there is a rapid uptake of nicotine into the brain, as shown by animal studies. A 1950 study by Werle and Meyer showed that the brain had the highest levels of nicotine compared to other bodily organs immediately after the injection of nicotine into the blood stream.
Tolerance to the drug develops. Repeated use of nicotine produces diminished results so that a smoker needs more cigarettes to produce the desired effects. Studies show that smokers will gradually increase their number of cigarettes smoked per day until they reach a level that they then maintain day after day, largely without change. The 1985 National Health Interview Survey showed that 89.4% of smokers smoked over 5 cigarettes per day. Smokers increase their cigarette intake until they reach the nicotine level that produces the effects that they desire.
Physical dependence with withdrawal syndromes are present as well as a strong tendency to relapse after quitting. Nicotine withdrawal can cause craving for nicotine, irritability, frustration, anger, anxiety, difficulty concentrating restlessness, decreased heart rate, and increased appetite or weight gain. These signs of withdrawal can be detected within 2 hours after the last cigarette use and will decline as time passes. Some of what happens is a reversal of the effects of the nicotine. For example, nicotine has been shown to suppress appetite thus when nicotine is no longer used, the appetite would return to what it would normally be when nicotine is not in the system and body weight would increase. The urge to smoke may persist despite a desire to quit or repeated attempts at quitting.
Recognizing tobacco use as an addiction is critical for treating the user. Again from Otis Bowen’s letter to President Bush, he states:

Private health organizations, health-care providers, community groups, and government agencies should initiate or strengthen programs to inform the public of the addicting nature of tobacco use. A warning label on the addicting nature of tobacco use should be rotated with other health warnings now required on cigarette and smokeless tobacco packages and advertisements. Preventing the initiation of tobacco use must be a priority because of the difficulty in overcoming nicotine addiction once it is firmly established. Because most cases of nicotine addiction begin during childhood and adolescence, school curricula on the prevention of drug use should also include tobacco...The disease impact of smoking justifies placing the problem of tobacco use at the top of the public health agenda.

By treating the user, and more importantly by educating people in order to prevent them from taking that first cigarette, we can prevent the hundred thousands of avoidable deaths that occur each year.

The Problem of Smoking

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Smoking is the best way to bad health. Today half the men and a quarter of the women in the world smoke on the average.

Some people think that there is not much sense in refraining from smoking, since the inhabitants of many cities and even villages breathe air contaminated with industrial and automobile wastes. They are very wrong. Vehicle exhaust gases are harmful in themselves, but a smoking driver is subjected to something far more dangerous.

Take another example: according to WHO (World Health Organisation) figures, the sick rate is higher among smoking workers of the heavy engineering, chemical, ceramic, mining, building, cement and rubber industries.

The harm of tobacco smoke on women should be especially emphasized. In particular, smoking may affect the course of pregnancy. Smoking women may bring into the world crippled or abnormal children.

The evidence that exposure to other people's smoke is dangerous to health is now incontrovertible. The exposure to secondhand smoke is a serious health risk to non-smokers, increasing their chance of contracting lung cancer and heart disease. The degree of risk depends on the extent and duration of exposure. Particularly there is a high risk among workers in the hospitality industries (bar staff, casino workers and other employees in workplaces where smoking is routine). It is estimated that secondhand smoke causes one premature death a week.

In the past few years some measures have been taken to reduce smoking. There has been a growing awareness of the dangers of smoking throughout the world. The anti-smoking campaigns launched in a number of countries have brought about extensive public censure of this harmful habit and a decrease in the number of smokers among some groups of the population.

In our country the campaign to beat the cigarette habit has acquired a purposeful nature. Special legislative, medical and educational measures are being worked out.

Instructions forbid smoking among schoolchildren. Lessons on the harm of smoking have been included in courses of the anatomy, physiology and hygiene, the sale of cigarettes to minors is prohibited. Warnings against the harm of smoking are printed on packets of cigarette brands.

The ministries of railways, civil aviation, merchant marine and culture have worked out and now implement measures for regulating, limiting and restricting smoking in long-distance and suburban trains, planes, on sea vessels, in theatres, clubs, etc.