Cigarettes: Importance Of Evil

Cigarettes: The Importance of Evil

Growing up, I remember always having my mom drive me over to grandma's house to spend the day while she went to work. I also remember my grandma always smoking cigarettes, which I knew were bad because my mom had told me so. What I didn't know at the time was that cigarettes were the reason that when I went to grandma's house, I wasn't able to see grandpa. Later on, I found out that he had died from cancer, which was almost certainly due to how many cigarettes he smoked everyday. After learning that, I was confused to say the least as to why my grandma continued to smoke cigarettes. I also would think to myself why cigarettes were legal if they killed people. Those were some questions I had about cigarettes many years ago. Today, I have figured out the answers to those questions and others about cigarettes, and especially since I am a non-smoker, they make me angry.

In America, thousands of people, both young and old, pick up a cigarette and smoke it for the first time every single day. After these new smokers smoke a few cigarettes in a relatively short period of time, they become addicted to the tar and the tobacco of the cigarettes. This is a problem, because the tar from the cigarettes can later on lead to malfunction of internal organs and even worse, can cause death. Diseases from smoking cigarettes that cause death are some of the most preventable deaths that occur in the United States. One could simply stop smoking, yet deaths related from cigarette smoking still reach almost 500,000 every single year in the United States. It is surprising to some that smoking related deaths are greater than other large causes of death such as cardiovascular diseases, accidents, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and diabetes. Now if I am able to find out this kind of information and how many people cigarettes kill, then certainly the government has it as well. And if the government knows that smoking cigarettes and the use of tobacco causes cancers that will lead to death of so many Americans, then why are cigarettes not made illegal?

Smoking cigarettes or other tobacco products leads to a vast amount of diseases to the smoker, and sometimes even nonsmokers as a result of second-hand smoke, which could have and should have been prevented. Knowing that I could have been able to see my grandpa, even today, if he had not smoked makes me wish people were informed of the dangers of smoking cigarettes. I didn't know this until a while ago, but people actually are informed of the dangers of smoking. On each pack of cigarettes there is a warning from the surgeon general warning against the detrimental effects of smoking cigarettes. Each pack of cigarettes actually says that smoking this is bad for you, yet people continue to buy and smoke cigarettes. It is a sad fact that these warnings are doing very little if any, as seen by the constant increase of smokers from year to year.

Like I mentioned earlier, there are various types of diseases that one can get from smoking. For example, a common disease in emphysema which makes it difficult for people to breath. The most frightening disease from smoking, however, is cancer. There can be all sorts of cancers resulting from smoking cigarettes, all over a person's body. For example, it is not uncommon for people to get cancer in the mouth and lips, especially from chewing tobacco, throat, kidneys, stomach, pancreas, liver, colon and rectum. Lung cancer is also very common and can be very deadly.

Despite all of these diseases, the demand for tobacco related products in the United States is still very high. This may seem surprising to some, as it did for me. Growing up, even throughout high school, I never really saw all that many people smoking besides my grandma, of course. Coming to college however, it is the complete opposite. Every single day when I am walking around campus, I see numerous people smoking cigarettes. Even at nine in the morning, as awful as it sounds, you can easily see people lighting up. If I ever got to class without seeing a single person smoking, I would be very shocked. Now I can see first hand why the demand for tobacco is so high.

So many Americans smoke in the United States, and as a result, an extremely large amount of people obtain some of the diseases mentioned earlier. Hoping to stay alive and get cured, they are forced to seek professional help. The professional help that they will need does not come free, and in fact it is quite expensive. My grandpa was diagnosed with lung cancer at a relatively late stage, and it became too much to deal with not only physically, but also financially as well.

Perhaps the government doesn't make smoking cigarettes illegal, because by making people sick until the point of death, the medical industry greatly benefits from cigarettes. Millions of people smoking cigarettes leads to many diseases, and hoping to get these cured, people have to turn to hospitals. The cost of medical expenses as a result of smoking related illnesses is many billions of dollars every single year. This amount is huge and has a strong effect in supporting the medical industry and the United States economy. Since so many million people buy packs of cigarettes and light up numerous times every single day, the production of tobacco need to be very high to have enough of a supply. This creates a lot of job openings which Americans are able to fill, where instead they might not have a job and be on the streets.

As smokers get old and die as a result of noting else but smoking related diseases, tobacco companies need new customers so that they're business would continue to grow. The tobacco companies that produce