Essay, Research Paper: Smoking

Smoking

Why do people want to hurt themselves? Millions of people a day light up a cigarette knowing it hurts them physically, mentally, and has long term effects. Educating people is the key to stopping the epidemic, but sometimes experience can also help. I have been smoking for two years now and am starting to notice some of the effects. I was confident I wouldn’t get addicted, but I am still smoking. The only way to warn others about smoking is by warning them about the effects.
Smoking can change your physical characteristics. Have you ever seen an older man with teeth the color of bananas? That is only one effect of smoking. Smoking also causes bad breath and causes your clothes to smell. The smell is embedded in your mind and body. It is an undescribable smell and everyone else can smell it. If a person smokes they become immune to the smell and they have lost their sense of smell. I experience this everyday, my family tells me I smell like rotten eggs. Maybe that is an exaggeration, but I can’t really tell because I can’t really smell it. It can also shift the color of your eyes. I had a friend who used to smoke in grammar school, I noticed that his eyes were dull yellow. It’s worst attribute physically is that it decreases stamina. I remember when I was in highschool I used to play a lot of sports. Now I really don’t play to any sports because I can barely run. I start to huff and puff getting to my English class on the third floor. It effects any way of staying fit.
Smoking causes weight gain and mental stress. When a person begins to gain weight they start to feel fat. If you are not comfortable with your weight it might hurt your self esteem. Smoking also causes mental stress because of the addiction to it. Sometimes when I feel I’m under stress I have to smoke a cigarette. If I don’t I feel uneasy. Another thing is after every meal I have to complete it with a cigarette or the meal isn’t complete. Smokers are being exiled by society because smoking also causes health problems to non smokers. Each year about 3,000 non smoking adults die of long cancer as a result of second hand smoke. Smoking can also hurt your pocket. Nowadays cigarettes are getting more expensive due to taxes. I smoke at least a pack per day. It is about five dollars for a pack of cigarettes and you can do the rest of the math. Smoking is like falling from a plane, you lose your self-control. In a way the nicotine controls your mind. It is not you who is smoking the cigarette, the cigarette is smoking you. It becomes a characteristic of the personality of a person. The long term effects are even worse.
When you smoke a cigarette it contains nicotine, an addictive drug and more than 4,000 chemical compounds including at least 43 cancer causing compounds. Smoking also causes heart disease, low birth weight of newborns and Emphysema and that is only the beginning of it. It also effects organs that are not directly exposed to the smoke, such as the bladder, pancreas, kidney, stomach, liver, and uterus. Studies have shown it can also cause cardiac arrest, because of lack of exercise. Emphysema is also a bad way to die. It causes the narrowing and clogging of the air way passages in your lungs. In English that means a large amount of mucus. I face it every morning. I still can’t understand why I do it.
I’m thinking about quitting this spring. Sometimes planning things in the future really doesn’t work out, but I hope I can pull this one off. Now I understand the consequences of smoking and wish I never started. It has effected the way I live. I want to go back to being athletic and feeling in shape. Someone once told me that smoking shows weakness in a man but I’m not a weak person. This is my warning to people who think smoking is cool. It is a way of committing suicide.


Word Count: 700