Smoking should be banned.
By Isla Joyce
There’s nothing worse than walking past someone in the street, taking a big, refreshing breath of air, only to find that your lungs are not being filled up with oxygen. You try to cough it out, but you just keep breathing in more of this deadly smoke. That was one breath that you will never get back. Smoking should be banned.
Cigarette smoking causes around 5,000 deaths in NZ each year. That's 13 people a day. Smoking can provide many other problems and troubles as well as death. Over 60 of the chemicals found in cigarette smoke can cause some type of cancer. Your lungs are an important part of your body. Smoking harms your lungs by damaging the tiny hairs (cilia) that help clean your lungs. Without properly functioning cilia, toxic substances from the cigarette smoke stay in your lungs, which later on can move on to other organs through your bloodstream. Smoking also affects your looks. Smokers tend to get fine lines in their skin causing them to look older. The Ministry of Health says that ‘this might be because smoking reduces blood flow and may damage tissue’. Many of the chemicals in tobacco smoke gets into your bloodstream and can end up traveling through your body. Carbon monoxide takes away oxygen from your muscles, brain and body. Every cigarette you smoke temporarily increases your heart rate and blood pressure and narrows small blood vessels under your skin. Smoking should be banned.
Smoking is no cheap habit. It chews through money. Someone who smokes a pack a day spends about $117 a week which totals up to over $9,200 every year. Smoking doesn't just steal smokers money though. A University of Otago study in 2007 estimated that the direct cost of smoking to the Ministry of Health was $300 million to $350 million. Just think, if everyone stopped smoking we could use this money for something else. Something good, not something deadly.
People who smoke aren’t just affecting themselves. They're damaging and changing everyone around them. Like I said at the start. Every time you walk past someone smoking in the street, or sit next to a smoker in a pub you are breathing in cigarette smoke and harming your body. But that's not all that happens. Smokers are easy to pick out because;
a) they look older and worn
b) they stink.
The smell of smoking is not a nice smell. Also, what's more, it clings to you and follows you everywhere like a shadow. This is something washing machines need to wash more than once to get rid of. Smoking should be banned.
Thirteen people a day die of smoking, that is 13 too many. Smoking is not cheap, it costs each individual smoker who smokes a pack a day $9,200 a year. And lastly but certainly not least, smoking is not just harmful and hurtful to the smoker themself, it damages everyone around them. Smoking is deadly. Every time you light a cigarette, you are saying that your life isn't worth living.
Quit smoking, start living.
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