Smoking is harmful your health!

Smoking is injurious to health” is a common quote found almost everywhere and known by everyone. But the question arises that how many people actually obey the quote and act accordingly. It is quoted that "A cigarette is a pipe with a fire at one end and a fool at the other".

Knowing the injurious effects of smoking, don’t be the fool to try it. Cigarette smoking is addictive and harmful. In a single cigarette, there 4000 chemicals which are highly poisonous and few are carcinogenic (cancer-causing).

If a heavy smoker decreases their cigarette intake by about half and maintains that reduction (a difficult thing to do under the best of circumstances), a couple of people may not get lung cancer.   But there will be no benefit to the approximately 263,000 people who die every year from some tobacco related illness other than lung cancer. 

How many heavy smokers do you know that can cut their intake in half and maintain that reduction?  Or, who don’t inhale more deeply when they decrease the number of cigarettes they smoke? Or who don’t cover up the holes in the filter when they try to reduce their consumption?   I suspect the answer is: not many.  Smokers know too many tricks that make it look like they are cutting back, but in fact still enable them to inhale almost the same amount of nicotine into their lungs and their bodies that they received when they were smoking a larger number of cigarettes.

So what we have here is an unrealistic expectation that some may use to justify continued smoking. 

We need to be direct and accurate in our message: smoking is bad for your health.  Reducing your cigarette consumption is not going to be the answer for any particular individual.  The difficult fact is that if you are a smoker, you need to stop, and if you are a non-smoker, don’t start.  And, if you work in or patronize an establishment where smoking is allowed, you need to know you are placing yourself at risk.

If you are a smoker, I would take no comfort in the results of these research reports.  The message today is the same as it has been for many years:  there is no such thing as a “safe level “of exposure to cigarette smoke.

We need to heed that message, and make certain that our smoking friends and the politicians understand it as well.

• Carbon Monoxide - this is a poisonous gas. It has no smell or taste. The body finds it hard to differentiate carbon monoxide from oxygen and absorbs it into the bloodstream. Faulty boilers emit dangerous carbon monoxide, as do car exhausts.
  
  If there is enough carbon monoxide around you and you inhale it, you can go into a coma and die. Carbon monoxide decreases muscle and heart function, it causes fatigue, weakness, and dizziness. It is especially toxic for babies still in the womb, infants and individuals with heart or lung disease.
• Tar - consists of several cancer-causing chemicals. When a smoker inhales cigarette smoke, 70% of the tar remains in the lungs. Try the handkerchief test. Fill the mouth with smoke, don't inhale, and blow the smoke through the handkerchief. There will be a sticky, brown stain on the cloth. Do this again, but this time inhale and the blow the smoke through the cloth, there will only be a very faint light brown stain.