Essay Summary of Argumentative Essay
EJ Barr Mrs. Rhonda Crombie English 1101 12-11-12 Why Cigarette Smoking Should Be Banned The idea of cigarettes being banned has been an ongoing topic for the past thirty years. Many people believe that smoking cigarettes is a disgusting and dangerous habit and that it should be made illegal, and I am one of those people. Smoking is dangerous to a person’s health, people around them, and also to their pockets. Cigarette smoking is very unattractive and unhealthy to other people.
Smokers create unpleasant smells to themselves and everything they own. Smoking also dulls and ages a smoker’s appearance by creating premature wrinkles, yellow teeth, bad breath, yellow fingernails, and the annoying “smoker’s cough”. Also, there is concern today about passive smoking. Recent research has shown that non-smokers can suffer health problems if they spend long periods of time among people who do smoke. Cigarette smoking is, obviously, a dangerous habit that can kill you.
Smoking creates many harmful diseases such as lung cancer, emphysema, heart cancer, and many more deadly diseases. The 2,000 known poisons in cigarettes, such as tar, carbon, and rat poison, are the contributors to the many diseases a smoker attains. Also, cigarette smoking is extremely addictive. Nicotine, the chemical in cigarettes that make them so addictive, is a colorless, odorless oily substance that occurs naturally in nature. It is proven that nicotine damages your brain right after the first time a person smokes because of the receptors in it.
Not only does it damage the brain, it can potentially damage a person’s whole life. A person can face cancer, a deathly disease just becuase they are addicted to a cigarette, which is such a crazy concept to me. While being harmful to themselves, smoker’s run a risk of harming others around them while they smoke. Second hand smoke victims are just as vunerable to many of these diseases as the smoker themselves. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has found that tobacco smoke contains 7,000 chemical compounds.
More than 250 of those are known to be harmful, and of those, at least 69 of those are known to cause cancer. (2) There is also evidence that second hand smoke may be linked to childhood leukemia, and cancer of the larynx, pharynx, brain, bladder, rectum, and stomach. Second hand smoking is neither fair nor healthy for any of the parties involved. If smokers have the choice to slowly kill themselves, then the people around them that are affected should have a choice whether or not they breathe in someone else’s smoke.
Cigarette smoking is also very expensive to the smoker and their family. A pack of twenty-five cigarettes averages around four dollars. (1) If a smoker smokes a pack per day he or she will spend around 1,500 dollars per year, and roughly 15,000 dollars every ten years. With that kind of money, a smoker could almost have enough to buy themselves a new car! Also, a smoker is more likely to catch colds, the flu, and other respiratory infections. That means more trips to the doctor and more money spent.
In conclusion, cigarette smoking helps no one, does not add to our society in any positive way, and it slowly kills people. Cigarettes also cause discomfort for people who have to be around it, and it can be harmful to the health of those who are not even smoking at all. Because of all these reasons, I believe that smoking cigarettes should be made illegal. Everything about this past time is harmful and has no use. Cigarettes should be put down by everyone in our nation, and better lifestyles and past times should be picked up.
