Smoking was once thought of as a habit, pure and simple, nothing that big to worry about.
It was not dangerous they said back then.
The fact that smokers died younger than non smokers was coincidental or related to other health issues.
(Of course, the issues were not attributed to smoking at that time either.
) We all know that smoking is dangerous now, even second hand smoke is potentially lethal, but still, there are the smokers, puffing away as they burn up days, months even years off their life expectancy.
From the very start of our lives, cigarettes can cause us trouble.
If our mothers are smokers while we are gestating, we can be born with birth defects or low birth weight.
According to the truth.
com website, big tobacco executives suggested that women would want to have smaller babies, because "it is easier to for the birth".
Low birth weight babies are at a bigger risk for serious effects from common illnesses as well as at a bigger risk of dying from SIDS.
How harmful is smoking? Try this one on for size: smoking kills over twenty times more people than murder.
What? I could not believe that one either.
Smoking, a voluntary act, kills more people- as in they lose their lives for something they choose to do, than murder, a crime for which people get punished.
So, smoking, which is perfectly legal, kills more people than something that is not only immoral, but illegal as well.
In 2006 there were over five million people who died from smoking and smoking related illnesses worldwide.
That is over fifty people an hour.
The sheer numbers are frightening.
They should be printed on the side of every cigarette box in huge letters and if someone would still light up after reading them, then they should go to it.
I have never smoked myself and it scares me to death to think of numbers like this.
Nearly all of the lung cancer deaths in US women is smoking related.
My mother had cancer, but not of the lungs.
The fact that she smoked since she was fourteen years old (gasp) may have contributed to the fact of her cancer and the severity with which the disease struck her.
Before she died, she had gone into remission once and then had the cancer come back, a heart surgery and a "mystery" lung disease which the doctors said may or may not have been an infection.
Either way, she finally stopped smoking after the first round of cancer- but we still lost her.
There are over eleven known human carcinogens in cigarette smoke, and yet there are people who will swear that smoking is not dangerous.
If you tried to give me something that even one known cancer causing element in it, I think I would have to pass, let alone eleven.
Smoking has cost me and my family enough- we lost my mother.
I will not revisit that pain on my own children.
I will not smoke.