smoking kills, and not only the smoker ! (Smoking in general)

Member Name: dr.ruth

Product:	Smoking in general
Date:	08/10/01 (695 review reads)
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Advantages: ABSOLUTELY NONE

Disadvantages: death, disability, cost

I have heard just about all the excuses that smokers use to justify their habit. From "there's no proof that smoking damages health" to "I don't inhale". So let's look at a few hard facts about smoking.

So there's no proof? Well, even the cigarette companies have admitted that they falsified research, and suppressed findings and now they are paying billions in damages for smoking related diseases. So yes, there is proof, if has just been hidden for decades.

Everyone knows about the lung cancer. It is the fastest growing cancer in the western world. But did you know that 95% of people with bladder cancer are smokers (and remember that only 33% of the population are smokers). Most of the people with lip, tongue and throat cancers are also smokers. And those are only a few of the cancers that are more common in people who smoke.

But smoking doesn't only cause cancer. There are over 300 active substances in a cigarette, and as many as 100 of them are classified as toxins, including benzene. Others are simply "harmful to health". Many of them work by causing spasm of blood vessels, or damaging the walls of the blood vessels. This leads to diseases like heart disease and heart attacks, strokes and blood clots. The blood flow can be so badly affected that fingers, toes and even whole legs may have to be amputated. One cigarette can so affect the blood flow that even after minor operations the wound can fail to heal and get infected.
The lungs are also badly affected. Smokers are prone to emphysema (my grandfather died of this, and it is a horrible way to spend your last few years) and chronic chest disease. Chest infections are more frequent and more severe than in non smokers.

Smoking also affects those around you. Women who smoke in pregancy have a 4 times greater cahnce of miscarrying. Their babies are also smaller, as they have been starved of a good oxygen supply in the womb. If
you smoke near an infant, there is a 10 times increased risk of cot death. Smoking regularly near a baby increases by up to 5 times the risk that the baby will develop asthma, a life threatening disease.
If you smoke near a non-smoking adult with asthma you may precipitate an asthma atttack that can kill (and you may not even realise that it was you, because an attack can take a few hours before it becomes severe). If that adult is genetically susceptible to the effects of the toxins in cigarettes, you may be exposing that poor person to the equivalent damage of 40 cigarettes a day. And even in a "normal" non-smoker, those fumes have been shown to cause narrowing of the blood vessels to the heart. The fumes that are breathed out by a smoker still carry most of the toxins, and non-smoking spouses of smokers have been shown to have a higher rate of lung diseases and chest infections than those who are not exposed to smoking. And I'm not even going to mention the stale smell and bad breath that go with them.

Nearly one third of the population of the world smoke. That means that two third of us believe the dangers, and do not wish to poison ourselves. And yet, virtually everywhere we go we are subjected to the fumes that a few people breathe out. Smokers claim that it is their basic human right to light up, but they are wrong. Your basic rights are inviolable as long as they to not infringe on the basic right of others. By breathing toxins at us, they are infringing our basic right to health and a decent environment.

Much of the costs of the NHS go on treating smoking related diseases - two thirds of us pay for the excesses of the one third. And the taxes on cigarettes do not begin to cover this.

It is time that the non-smokers stood up for their basic human rights, and demanded that smoking be restricted to places where smokers can damage only themselves. Somehow, the "cool" image of smoking, so cleverly insinuated
by the cigarette companies, must be replaced with the realistic image of what smoking actually does so that youngsters don't start in the first place.

SMOKING KILLS, DON'T LET IT KILL YOU

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