Today every second or third teenager smokes. Smoking became a part of our life, just like a part of our style. Everyday we get up early in the morning and dream about a cigarette to make ourselves ‘wake up’. Of course all people know about the danger of smoking: we know about cancer, different inflammations, the effect of yellow teeth and hoarse voice, but we don’t care about it when buying a packet of cigarettes.
Nicotine is one of the most harmful poisons of the vegetable origin. Birds (pigeons, sparrows) die if only you bring the stick, moistened in the nicotine to their beak. The rabbit dies from ? drops of nicotine, the dog – ?. For a human being the mortal dose is from 50 to 100 mg, or, better say, 2-3 drops. Such an amount of nicotine gets everyday into the blood of a person, who smokes 20-25 cigarettes (each cigarette contains approximately 6-8 mg of nicotine, from which 3-4 mg get into the blood).
The smoker does not perish because the doze is to be entered gradually, not at once. Besides, the part of nicotine will neutralize with formaldehyde – other poison containing in tobacco. Within 30 years such a person smokes approximately 20000 cigarettes, or 160 kg of tobacco, absorbing at an average 800 g of nicotine. Regular absorption of small, not fatal dozes of nicotine causes a habit, predilection for smoking. Nicotine includes in the processes of metabolism, occurring in the organism of the person, and becomes necessary for it. However if the non-smoking person will get a significant doze of nicotine at once, he may die.
Such cases were observed in the different countries. In France, in Nice, as a result of competition “Who will smoke More”, two “winners” won, having smoked 60 cigarettes. They died, and other participants with a heavy poisoning got to the hospital.
In England there was a case when the long-smoker man smoked 14 cigars and 40 cigarettes during the hard night at work. In the morning he felt badly, and, despite of the medical aid given, he died.
Children who live in the places filled with smoke suffer from respiratory organs diseases. Children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy, have a predisposition to difficult illnesses. Also, there’re more than 200 harmful maters in a tobacco smoke, as: sterol, charcoal gas, prussic acid, radioactive poloniy and many other terrible things! All these call for such illnesses as the heart’s illness, the illness of blood, tuberculosis, defeat of stomach and bowels, cancer of lungs and so on.
Of course it doesn’t mean that if you take a cigarette, the death waits for you because of above numerated illnesses, but later maybe some of smokers become surprised if they find the strange illnesses inside themselves.
A packet of cigarettes costs very cheap, but we don’t mind the real price we pay, the price is our health.
Let’s take for example, Mallboro. This brand of cigarettes is well spread not only in our country, so we can only pretend the astronomic amounts of money in tax, which government receives! However, there is a careful health warning on every packet of cigarettes: ‘Smoking can call for illness of cancer’. I don’t think the government is seriously interested in warning people of this danger. The tobacco companies do their work and sometimes sponsor some sport events, like football or volleyball.
In any case, nowadays some cigarette companies ‘care’ about their clients. For example, they provide people with warnings of illnesses, putting little sheets of paper with warnings written on them into the packet of cigarette, or making big-boards in large cities, where there’re pictures of damaged organs as a result of smoking. These measures probably not help very actively, but at least they make people THINK and analyze what they’re doing.
We have other problems, like alcohol, too. Statistic says, most of the time families break up because of alcohol, but even sometimes because of nicotine. Government probably will never do these drugs illegal, they can’t refuse to money. In our country in many public places smoking is banned and I don’t think anything about it will be changed. But I hope we’ll never see smoking couple in the theatre, thank you very much!
I can add only one thing in my conclusion: smoking will never be banned and the humanity will suffer of many new and unknown illnesses, which call this little packet of cigarette that you bought yesterday at the stop.
