Cigarettes are seriously harmful to health and should be criminalized. Cigarettes have been around since the 1920s and their popularity has grown substantially since then. People have become so addicted to this culture of consuming slow poison that we don’t even consider the side effects of this poison on our bodies like lung damage, cancer, and environmental pollution. Unfortunately, this vice has become a part of our daily life. The smoke that people accidentally inhale from cigarettes has a direct effect on our lungs and gradually damages them. A great deal of comprehensive research has been done on this topic and all come to similar conclusions; smoking directly damages our lungs, weakening them day by day, smoke by smoke, cigarette by cigarette.
Our lungs slowly deteriorate leading to critical problems like asthma, wheezing, and other respiratory complications. One would think that lung problems are the only side effect that smoking has on the human body, but the worst side effect it can have is actually something else, namely “cancer”. Cancer is one of the most common causes of death today, and smoking is one of the most common causes of various types of cancer. A person can smoke peacefully one day and wake up with cancer the next. Is this what we humans want, death due to addiction? Another significant side effect of smoking is environmental pollution. People nowadays smoke wherever they like, especially in third-world countries like Pakistan and the like. People apparently ignore or refuse to follow the smoking ban. They smoke where they like, and we don’t think at all why this is so. Isn’t it simply because people don’t face consequences for this act? There are no proper laws or rules to restrict these things because we do not consider smoking to be harmful or deadly.
Smoking has become an act that we consider cool and equate it with being rich and extravagant, reflecting one’s personality or simply showing off. This has made us completely ignore the health problems that go hand in hand with cigarette smoking. It is important to consider that smoking not only harms the smoker and especially his own body but also endangers the people around them. Secondhand smoke is the act of indirectly inhaling smoke; through someone else’s exhaled smoke. The health problems associated with secondhand smoke are relatively similar to smoking. It can cause breathing problems in children, and living with a smoker can cause health problems such as heart disease and stroke. It is important to know that by smoking we are not only bringing ourselves closer to death.
I believe it is time we consider this grave danger we face every day. It is no wonder that you will be up against more than one smoker every day of your life and it is truly disturbing. If this is not stopped soon, if cigarettes are not banned, millions of people will continue to die, all because we have failed to evaluate the dangers that a cigarette could cause. Every day we see more and more people smoking, even young children are smoking these days, and 12-14-year-olds are smoking, drinking, and so on. It is time we step up for our younger generations and makes things right for a better future. It is important to educate ourselves and our children about these health issues and the toxic ways in which they are promoted. It’s not cool to slowly time your own death. Smoking never was and never will be cool. Because there’s nothing cool about dying.
