Why I quit smoking!!!

What influence has the tobacco industry had on you? In the following I will analyze different occurrences that have a relationship with cigarette smoking in the U.S. and abroad; some will be of my own personal experience; also, I will discuss the way, which major industries focus on young people.
I can recall when I was a child the harsh times that I had as a result of second hand smoke, we owned a large house but our family resided in a small apartment of two bedrooms and a kitchen in the southern portion of the twelve bedroom abode. The reason my family lived in that section was because the rest of the house was rented out to various tenants. The bedroom that I slept was adjacent to the kitchen were my father would drink his morning coffee and smoke all the time; he never gave any consideration to his children. This repugnant act aided in my animosity towards smoking, but later you will see how this effect compelled a different outcome.
Many smokers in the US and around the world never consider second hand smoke; the belief that smoking is only damaging to the smoker is purely fabrication. “Some problems for non-smokers are a better risk of lung cancer over those not exposed to smoking. Infants and children have increased occurrences of respiratory infections such as bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma, and decreased lung function as the lungs develop because of second hand smoke. Non-smokers experience upon exposure to smoke problems pertaining to the eyes, nose, throat, and lower respiratory tract that may be fatal”1, but reducing exposure and limiting the smoke inhalation will undoubtedly reduce such risks; furthermore, the United States in the past decade has become very strict on smoking in public places which also limits second hand smoke inhalation. In countries like Greece the scenario is entirely different; although smoking is prohibited in many places it is not drastically enforced.
Another major problem pertaining to the tobacco companies is that many, and almost all tobacco company’s focus on under aged groups. The problem is not personal, its just business; many large companies focus on young people to catch them for life. A good non-tobacco example is Porsche, the company makes toy cars with the idea that the children playing with the car young will have a greater chance buying the car when their old i.e. buy Porsche. Companies such as Mattel have invested in the miniature Porsche and they are exclusively sold at some dealerships. Tobacco companies on billboards, in youth magazines or during television sitcoms, sporting events, cartoons; movies that are focused on teens, use a similar marketing strategy promoting the fact that smoking is cool. A tricky but effective marketing strategy is product placement, the product is inserted into a movie, for example Tom Cruse might smoke X cigarettes on the film. This focuses on the millions who follow the entertainment industry. In the last decade the U.S. government began censuring and restricting most of the advertisements focused on youth groups.
However, internationally the problem still plagues youth groups. Greece is a good example on how tobacco companies dominate entire countries, there is no ban focusing on child targets as life consumers; therefore a large portion of the countries teens are susceptible to smoking, as a result the majority of the country smokes cigarettes. Children begin smoking as young as age thirteen, fact, there is no age limit on the purchase of tobacco related products in Greece; parents that are smokers do not highly impede the youths experimental smoking because of their addiction, judging by the naked eye, nine out of ten youths that embark on military service in Greece begin smoking, fact, governmental tax on cigarettes, which is outrageous is a major source of the countries national income; why get them to stop smoking when were making money. Judging by personal experience, I was hanging out at New York College with a friend, as I observed a group of ten students sitting on a marble located outside of the building were they were sitting together, I noticed eight of them were smoking cigarettes. Although this is not a national study I constantly run into this, many and almost all Greek people are smokers.
My family owned a smoke shop that sold thousands of cigarette packs and other forms of tobacco each month, some were kept in humidors; we also sold lose cigarettes known as losies. I began to experiment with cigarettes when I was sixteen years old and I became addicted and couldn’t stop. . I began with losies because of the easy access; Newport was the best selling brand during that period of my life, evidently I started with those, and also tried a variety of others. The humorous thing was watching people purchase cigarettes, they mainly bought the popular brands such as Marlboro, Newport, Salem, the contrast was their existed hundreds of brands of cigarettes to chose from, and people mainly circled the major ones. Another popular sales brand was the generic, they aim to sell at half the price of original brands, and they sell as many packs as the main ones. Some customers bought cigarettes by the carton.
After smoking for a long time I began to encourage others to smoke as well. Me and the people that I hung out with would gather in the bathroom at school and light up a smoke because it was cool. This ritual became popular because it was illegal to smoke in public buildings. At the time I left the U.S. I was only smoking fifteen cigarettes a day; before I quit I was smoking forty cigarettes a day, when I realized the extreme hazards that were posed, I decided to quiet smoking by cold turkey. The main reason was I couldn’t enjoy athletics as I did in the past; also the fact that I would cough every day really aggravated me.
I read that smoking causes many health problems and I even noticed that some of the chemicals identified in the gas phase of tobacco smoke include: “acetone, acetonitrile, acethylene, ammonia, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide dimethylinitrosamine, hydrogen cyanide, methane, propane propene, pyridine, methyl chloride, methyl furan, nitrogen oxides, nitrospyrrolidine, propionaldehyde, 2-butane, 3-picoline, 3-binylpyridine to say the least. In addition, some of the chemicals in the particulate phase include: aniline, benz (a) pyrene, catechole, hydrazine, naphthalene, methylnaphthalene, methylquinolines, nicotine, NNK, phenol, pyrene, quinoline, stigmasterol, yoluene,"tar", water, 2-naphthylamine, 4-aminopiphyenyl, and for smokers, the specific health risks of tobacco use include: nicotine addiction, decreased senses of taste and smell, in pregnancy, increased fetal death, premature labor, low birth weight infants, and SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), lung disease--emphysema, chronic bronchitis, lung cancer ,coronary artery disease--angina, heart attacks, atherosclerotic and peripheral vascular disease--aneurysms, hypertension, blood clots, strokes, oral/tooth/gum diseases--including oral cancer, other cancers--kidney, bladder, and pancreas .”1 These are some problems that tobacco companies forgot to put on the billboard, why don’t they show you how pink your lungs were before smoking and how they look after.
The bottom line is to find a way to quit here are three good reasons. One reason is economic: How much do smokers spend a year on cigarettes? I personally spent one thousand five hundred dollars a year on cigarettes. What about our health; what happens when we quiet? “Evidence proves that within twenty minutes of quitting the blood pressure and pulse rate drop to normal, the body temperature of extremities (hands/feet) increases to normal. Inside eight hours of quitting, the carbon monoxide level in the blood drops to normal, the oxygen level in blood increases to normal. Twenty hours after quitting the risk of sudden heart attack decreases. After 48 hours of quitting nerve endings begin to regenerate. The senses of smell and taste begin to return to normal. Two weeks to three months after quitting the blood circulation improves, walking becomes easier; the function of the lungs increases up to thirty percent. During one to nine months of quitting overall energy typically increases, symptoms associated with chronic use decrease (such as coughing, nasal congestion, and shortness of breath), and cilia (the fine, hair like projections lining the lower respiratory tract) function begins to return to normal, which increases the body's ability to handle mucus and clean the respiratory tract, reduced respiratory infections also occur. Following one year of quitting, excess risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a tobacco user. And five years of quitting lung cancer death rate (for average one pack/day former smoker) decreases by nearly fifty percent, risk of cancer in the mouth is half that of a tobacco user. Ten years after quitting lung cancer death rate becomes similar to that of a nonuser, pre-cancerous cells are replaced with normal cell growth, risk of stroke is typically lowered possibly to that of a nonuser, risk of cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus, bladder, kidney, and pancreas decreases. After fifteen years of quitting risk of coronary heart disease is that of a nonuser.”1 Why all the hassle, smoking also makes your clothes, hair, hands, and skin stink; your teeth also become yellow, just quit.
In conclusion, one major important factor which I hesitated mentioning is that cigarette companies are sneaky conniving snakes, and the film that inspired me to write this intricate thought was The Insider with Al Pachino. The facts in this film are true. The information that Big Tobacco as mentioned in the former manipulates the government with its money and power is a very controversial issue in its self. The fact that major tobacco has lost billions from the U.S. markets only from lawsuits and strict laws prohibiting its mass distribution because of people like the insider from the film has only led the huge conglomerates to a more evasive international market. The regretful fact that only scorns the issue, are those people with the knowledge that tobacco consumption was known to be harmful as far back as the sixties and nothing was done to make consumers aware of it; consequently another fine example of the cooperate I don’t care, its just business “syndrome”. Furthermore the elusive truth behind the true ingredients in cigarettes will never be publicized; the public can only save itself by just not smoking, addiction is not from tobacco, but from human manipulation.


1 SOME EVIDENCE WAS PROVIDE BY http://health.yahoo.com/health/Diseases_and_Conditions/Disease _Feed_Data/primary_lung_cancer/}

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