Smoking kills you

Hey, it's a fact: over 50% of smokers die as a direct result of smoking. Doesn't that suck?! And I know it's higher than that, but I can't remember the exact percentage. Let's see what it does: causes wrinkles and leathery skin through its vasoconstrictive properties, yellows your teeth and fingers with the enclosed tar, causes chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder that will eventually get so bad you will feel short of breath even sitting in your lazy-boy, and causes heart disease. Doesn't that sound lovely?

Some people say they started smoking because it "relaxes" them. Nicotine is a stimulant. You get a buzz off of it. In fact, you start getting the buzz 7 seconds after your first puff, because that's how fast nicotine reaches your brain--faster than a direct injection into your vein (i.e., something like heroin)! Maybe the relaxation comes from the crash after the buzz, but I'm not buying it.

Research shows that if you don't start smoking by the time you're 25, you most likely won't. This means that we have to protect our young. We are most easily influenced when we're young and impressionable, just like all those under-25-year-olds: pre-teens, high school students, college students... "social smoking" is smoking. No ifs, ands, or buts. You ARE affecting your body! And you are going to be a pain in the ass when you land in the hospital 20 years from now, running our poor nurses off their feet because you decided that to be cool you had to breath 4000 chemicals into your lungs. Imagine how much that's going to cost the health care system! Let's save it for things that can't be prevented, like Type I (juvenile) diabetes, shall we?

So you don't care about your own body, and you don't think far enough into the future to see the effect on the health care system, tax dollars, money re-directed from community centres...how about the people around you when you smoke? You know how the cigarette has a filter, and when you take a puff the smoke goes through it, making it "better" for you? You're right, actually. The filter picks out the biggest particles of tar, soot, and ash out of the stuff you're breathing in so they don't settle in your lungs. But what about the other end of the cigarette? This is known as "sidestream" smoke. It doesn't go through a filter. The people around you (as well as you since you're there, too) are breathing those big particles in, along with the other stuff. They settle deep down in your lungs, and since the little cilia hairs that normally sweep particles up so you can swallow them were paralyzed and can't anymore, the particles stay there. Being irritable. Leading to pneumonia, emphysema, and lots of other great stuff.

The pee of a smoker is carcinogenic ("cancer causing"). Because the chemicals get past your lungs and into your blood, where they travel all over the body. That's why you can get things like bladder cancer from smoking. 13 other kinds, too, such as lung cancer.

Smoking makes me really angry. When I'm walking down the street, and see someone who is smoking, I want to stop and SLAP THEM, and ask them how they can be so stupid?! I'm sorry, smoking is really addictive, and most people have to try quitting something like 12 times before it's for good. Technically it's more addictive than heroin. But TRY IT, would you?