The Danger’s of Cigarette

Is Cigarette Smoking to Be Prohibited?

Smoking has been a way of life for thousands of years, yet the more we discover about the amount of damage it does, the more it must be prohibited. Tens of millions of people every year fall ill due to smoking—lung cancer, heart attack, and stroke are among the most common. Smoking is not just unhealthy for the smoker, though; it is also unhealthy for all the other people around them.

This raises a very valid question: There are people who think that it should be due to its serious health risk, not only to the smokers, but also to non-smokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke. There are people who think that smoking is a personal choice and banning it would be overreach on the government's part.

Yet when we balance the risks, the cost, and the impact on society, the reality becomes clear cigarette smoking is more harmful than helpful, and cigarettes need to be banned as part of the path to a more ideal world.

Why Cigarette Smoking Must Be Prohibited

1. Smoking Impacts More Than Just the Smoker

One of the most terrible things about smoking is that it doesn't just impact the person who is actually smoking the cigarette. Secondhand smoke carries more than 7,000 chemicals, most of which are toxic and carcinogenic. If a person smokes in public, at home, or even in a car if others are riding with them, the individuals around them—children, pregnant women, and those with respiratory illnesses in particular—can't help but inhale these toxic chemicals.

Numbers do not lie. As stated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 

over 480,000 people die of smoking-related diseases in the U.S. alone annually, and approximately 41,000 of those deaths are due to secondhand smoke. That is, non-smokers, people who never even had a single puff of cigarette in their entire lifetime, are dying just because they were exposed to smokers.

2. The Costly Smoking Habit

Apart from the health hazard, smoking is also a tremendous expense to society. Diseases caused by smoking cost the health system billions of dollars annually. In the United States alone, health care and productivity losses due to smoking amount to over $300 billion annually.

And who's paying these bills? The taxpayers in most instances. Governments have to fund public health initiatives, so even nonsmokers are contributing to help subsidize smokers' bills. Rather than billions of dollars being used to cure preventable illness, this could be used for funding education, roads, or health care that's healthier for all of us.

Economic Interests First, Among the most common arguments against the banning of cigarettes is the fact that millions of individuals are working under the tobacco industry, from farmers to laborers to entrepreneurs. Indeed, that might be true, but that will not blind us to the destruction caused by smoking. The fortunate thing is that governments can implement policies to convince workers to shift to other industries. Tobacco growers can be encouraged to produce alternative crops, and tobacco workers can be retrained to do alternative work. Furthermore, the economic cost of banning smoking would likely be more than outweighed through health savings. A healthier workforce means less sick leave, increased productivity, and reduced strain on healthcare services.

Conclusion

Lastly, smoking is not a matter of personal choice—it's a public health epidemic. The dangers of cigarettes reach far beyond the smoker himself, threatening innocent lives and squandering social resources. Banning smoking would be an infringement on personal liberty, some would say, but the truth is that no one's liberty should come at the expense of another's health.

Prohibiting cigarette smoking would save thousands of lives, lower health care costs, and pave the way to a healthier tomorrow for our future generation. It is not a matter of how much it will cost us to prohibit smoking—it is how much we cannot afford to live without it.

Source : https://www.health.gov.au/topics/smoking-vaping-and-tobacco/about-smoking/effects