Me: Why can’t you quit smoking? Ever thought of trying to stop? You know it’s harming you right? The health hazards caused by cigarettes are known to everybody these days. It’s ok that you are not extraordinarily sagacious, but come on; you are not a dullard too. Stop burning out those grey cells. You have got to worry about yourself my friend. Quit.
Them:Â Well, if all it is doing is harming me, then what’s the big deal? I am cool about the fact that I’ll live a few years less than you do. It’s my life and I am enjoying it this way…..and blah and blah and BLAH.
Now this is what fits perfectly into the definition of “crap” IN capitals. Let me tell this to all the “THEM” out there who are sitting with that lighted stick booting out circles of smoke and smirking at my article right now. Your cigarette gives you cancer, lung diseases, heart problems and a reduced life span….but I don’t give a damn about that. If you are so very flippant about the obvious fact that you are poisoning your own self, and all you want to do is keep going just for that tiny bit of ephemeral “pleasure”….then you have all the right in the world to go out and get high. Do all you can do to drain your system with so called “delights of life”. Feel free to pour in gallons of alcohol and get that “out of the world” feeling. But can you please….please stop smoking??
Killing you is not the only deed done by a cigarette. It is also killing the people who love you and the environment you live in. We all keep talking about the numerous harms that smoking does. But do we ever care about what it is doing to nature. The cigarette, right from its tip to the butt, is painting the earth charcoal black, and all we are doing about it is “smoking the problem off”!!!!
So in order to awaken the remaining bit of your working senses, “me”, the sensible two third of our global population still eschewing away from the fag, would like to jot down a few points that can make up good enough reasons to help you consider quitting.
- Our trees are already coping up with the very difficult task of helping us breathe by filtering the air for us. And by smoking, you are simply piling up work for them.
- Even before it comes packed in a super fantastic box into your pocket, it has done more than half of the harm already. Deforestation is one of the major environmental problems we are facing today. A modern cigarette manufacturing machine uses around four miles of paper per day to roll and package cigarettes. Wood is used today to cure tobacco. So if we do a little bit of mental maths, it comes out to be an estimated amount of one tree being consumed for every 300 precious cigarettes produced. And that rounds up to 60 million trees used per year by the farmers of Brazil which is the largest exporter of tobacco. I won’t list the consequences of deforestation. We all learned that in geography at school.
- Let’s talk about the butt now. Millions of cigarette butts are discarded every year. Some of them are picked up as waste, but half of them end up in the rivers and lakes where they are swallowed by the underwater creatures that have got absolutely no mechanism to digest tobacco. So they die (a lot before you do). The rest of the butts remain on the ground where they decompose in 25 years and envenom the soil and hence the plants. Basically, it harms even when it’s not there in a whole piece.
- Environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or the second hand smoke popularly known as passive smoke is a mixture of chemicals ejected out of the burning end of the cig. It has some 4700 substances out of which 243 are cancerous. This includes nicotine and etc etc (go Google them out!!!!)Â This smoke comes directly from the end on fire without being filtered and causes twice as harm to the passive smoker (includes your parents, friends, wife, kids and the guy sitting next to you at the bus stop) than it does to the actual one. The continuous expulsion of this is affecting the animals too.
- Cultivation of tobacco requires large amount of pesticides which harm the soil and seep into the water bodies as well. It also depletes the soil at a very fast pace.
- A large number of farmers are suffering from nicotine poisoning resulting into the “green tobacco sickness”.
- Air pollution caused due to cigarettes is 10 times more than that caused due to exhaust fumes from cars.
The smoke has a lot more disadvantages, but they hit “YOU” directly. So we are not talking about them. Because you are not a least bit concerned about what is happening in there.
You can sit peacefully in your study with a cigarette and continue your research on the third world countries oblivious to the fact that the use of land for the production of that little thing in your hand rebuffs the supply of food to millions of people in those very countries.
If ever you stop being egocentric (yes you are one!!) and a jerk, then this is a plea from all of us and from the generations to come….”PLEASE QUIT”. That’s the only solution.
P.S.: Smoking uses a lot of your hard earned money. First when you buy cigarettes and then when you buy meds. Give this a thought. You could buy yourself something lot better than that.
image: http://beta.thehindu.com/multimedia/dynamic/00102/INDIA_NO_TOBACCO_DA_102843f.jpg