Reasons to Quit Smoking
When Europeans invaded the New World several hundred years ago, they gave little thought to the prior claims of the Native Americans who lived here. The natives were either killed or marginalized, forced to accept Euro-American ways in order to survive. Millions of them perished in the process. But in the end, they had their revenge against the world: they gave us the addictive weed known as tobacco. In the past four centuries, many times more people have died from tobacco addiction and its attendant complications than died during the Native American genocide. In A.D. 2000 alone, approximately 4.2 million people died of tobacco-related illnesses. More than four million people in one single year.
There’s a whole host of reasons why you should quit smoking. We can skip the personal health reasons: surely you’re already aware that smoking deadens your senses of smell and taste, and that most smokers decrease their life spans by about 20-25 years, due to lung cancer, emphysema, and a dozen other illnesses and conditions. But not all reasons you should quit are health related: there are social reasons, too. Frankly, cigarettes stink, and their smoke tends to settle in your clothes and hair. For those of us with sensitive noses, the smell’s a definite turn-off. In addition, it stains your teeth and skin with a yellowish tint that’s difficult to remove.
Most smokers have never considered deeply the deadliest irony of smoking: that they’re paying the tobacco companies to ruin their health. Would you pay someone to give you muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s? Of course not. And yet smokers pay stiff fees just so they can experience cancer and other illnesses and later pay the ultimate price — death. Is the transient pleasure you feel in the process worth it? Is it worth the death of innocents?
It’s a well established fact (except among the scientists that the tobacco industry pays) that secondhand tobacco smoke — that is, smoke from the lungs of smokers and from the tips of their cigarettes — is nearly as toxic as smoke taken directly into the lungs. Individuals who have never taken a single drag can contract smoking-related illnesses, just because a horde of smokers were inconsiderate or uncaring enough to pollute the atmosphere they shared with others. Children are especially susceptible. If you have children, and you’re a smoker, you have a biological imperative to stop smoking if you want your kids to make it safely to adulthood.
Yes, smokers have rights — but they needn’t exercise them in blatant disregard for the rights of others. Want to be a nameless statistic, just another sacrifice on the altar of the tobacco companies’ greed? Go ahead, but go it alone. Be sure you take no one else with you. For if hell exists, my friend, to do otherwise is surely the quickest way to get there.
