Graphic b y Anna (R)
What is smoking? Well everybody should now what smoking is, it is the act of inhaling Tobacco smoke. In our present times is something that is recognized as normal worldwide. In past times smoking was considered as mandatory to be a man, or to be greater. The smoking habit increased dramatically between a lot of men and also women. Still that belief exists.
Teenagers are known to start smoking in average since they are 14 to 15 years old, but still there are cases in which smokers begin at earlier ages like 12 or start older as 17. On average, 6,000 children try their first cigarette, from this 6,000 children, 2,000 become regular smoker. Now imagine how much people that would be annually, it makes 60,000 teenage smokers monthly and 757,000 annually. What a huge number of teenage smokers is this. And there are many different reasons into which they might start smoking.
Smoking is a common addiction, it is a drug, it is addictive and does cause death, the world has a lot of people who smoke, mostly because it is addictive, and once you try it you’ll want to try it again, it makes you feel good… in a way. The cigarettes are very, very dangerous, they contain tar, which is the addictive chemical that sticks to your lungs and cause cancer, which usually kills you. That is why it is very important to learn how to say NO to these kinds of drugs. Smoking, as drugs is also a vicious circle, you use them, they get expensive, and then you have to sell them to be able to use them.
Many teenagers aren’t aware of all the damages and problems that smoking can produce. There are many long term effects, which teenagers don’t really care at that age because the consequences take a long time to take effect, but what are the short time effects?
Short term effects
- Bad breath: Your breath starts stinking into cigarette and many people you talk to start to notice you are a smoker, even parents can notice this
- Yellow teeth: Smoking produces yellow teeth which is not the type that everybody is whishing.
- Reduced physical performance: The physical performance of a smoker gets severly damaged as fatigue is faster, reducing the smoker’s ability to resist a sport.
Imagine having all of these, you start getting more tired at playing the sport you like, the yellow teeth doesn’t look very nice as everyone wishes clean white teeth and having most of the times a bad breath, that annoys the people around you.
But these is not the only thing that smoking produces, those just are the short terme effects, imagine the long ones, the deadly effects that everyone regrets.
These are the main long term effects
- Many types of cancer, including lung, mouth or another important organ: These is very deadly for your body, around 60 cancers are known to be caused by smoking, as usually a cancer brings death and these is not what we want for our lives.
- Weak teeth: a smoker’s teeth gets really weak and yellow, making it a lot easier for it to fall down and leaving that person with less teeth.
- Weak organs: smoke usually passes through all your body affecting all main organs making them weaker and increasing the cancer possibility.
All these effects greatly affect the body as many chemical gasses are entering the smoker’s body, around 4,000 different chemicals are entering into the smoker’s body and all these chemicals greatly affect the body causing damage to the respiratory system, digestive, blood circulation, immune system and even the muscular system. All these gets affected and damaged with smoking, it has even been proved that if a person smokes 4 cigarettes daily for around like a year, your life expectancy gets reduced 10 years.
Think it twice before smoking, smoking is something that in reality, doesn’t give anything positive, it doesn’t give you happiness neither any positive effect it just harms your health. It is something that causes addiction in a way that you will start to depend more and more on it, while still harming your health. Remember to think twice before smoking.
There are also a lot of ways to get rid of this addiction, there are some types of medicines that help you overcome this problem, as well as centers of rehabilitation, which take more time but they get rid of the addiction efficiently.
By: Andrés Adame, Carlos (M)
