Abdulmohsen
Alkahtani
Smoking
In this century,
many people smoke different kinds of tobacco such as cigarettes and hookah. And
also, there are many companies which produce different kinds of tobacco, and
these kinds of companies make a lot of money which is approximately equal to
the income of some countries. Yet, the problem is there are many young people
who smoke a lot which could cause a big problem for their health, society, or
economy. There are a lot of questions, but the most important questions are: What
are the major causes and effects of smoking, and what are the possible ways of
quitting smoking. While there are some people who think that smokers cannot
quit smoking, there are several ways to quit smoking.
Reasons People Smoke:
Smoking tobacco
has an old history. According to Pampel (2004) tobacco was discovered before
5000 years ago, and it was used for medical purpose and religious properties;
after that young people have used tobacco feel relaxed and fun; then it spread
widely in the world. Also, smoking has been debated during the past years by society.
During the seventeenth century, religious leaders and statesmen in many countries
condemned the use of tobacco. Smokers were excommunicated by the church, and
some of them were condemned to death and executed. This
history is providing that those leaders had known the danger of smoking on
people and they tried to protect people from dangers of smoking.
The world Health Organization and all
medical organizations 2010 emphasized that smoking is the biggest risk facing
humanity today. “Estimates of the number of yearly deaths from smoking –
related causes exceed 400,000 (about one-sixth of all deaths), and smokers can
expect to die 13-14 years earlier than nonsmokers. The situation has improved since
the famous 1964 report of the surgeon general on the harm of cigarettes, but it
remains serious. Despite falling cigarette use in past decades, 23 percent of
the U.S. population in the year 2000 smoked, and another 22 percent used to
smoke –making nearly half the population vulnerable to the risks of early
death. Worse, young people today continue to adopt the habit at about the same
rate as 10 years ago” (Pampel, 2010, 3).
These numbers show us the real danger of smoking and how smoking kills
more than what wars kill, but the most important question here is how we can
help smokers to quit smoking.
Smoking behavior
is learning behavior which means it is not a genetic thing, but it comes by
learning other habits. For example, “George attends a party and meets this
lovely young thing who is wearing a certain distinctive perfume. They have a
very pleasant time at the party and warm feelings are aroused. A few weeks
later, George walks into the library at school and smells that perfume. He
finds himself experiencing some very pleasant feeling and looking around to see
if the young woman is there. Up to the time he went to the party, the perfume
would have been just a pleasant aroma, or, conceivably, he wouldn’t have even
liked it. Now he feels good when he smells it” (Kish, 1988, 8). If we look carefully
to this example we will find that learning how to smoke starts when you spend a
lot of time with other smokers, who just smoke while you have a pleasant time
with them. So, here is the beginning of learning how to smoke tobacco.
According to Kish (1988), there are three possible ways to learn smoking (8-15):
I.
Associative
learning: which is you associate events that occur close together in time and respond
to them in a similar way;
II.
Instrumental
learning: this is that kind of behavior which functions to get a payoff for the
person; and
III.
Modeling
learning: this way define learning behavior by observe others.
In the first way, a lot of ads on TV try to associate a positive
feeling while watching one of their products. “A few years back, there was an
ad on TV showing a beautiful, slim, tanned young woman in a snow-white bikini
who undulated toward the camera and started drinking a cold can of Sprite. The
idea was to have you associate the positive feeling which you had toward the
girl with Sprite so that when your eyes fell upon the cans of Sprite at the
supermarket, you would experience some of these warm feeling” (Kish, 1988, 8).
The second way focuses on how learned behavior pays off. For example, when you
have headache you learn take an aspirin which is the behavior; so your headache
will be relieved, which is the payoff. In this example, people learn how to
smoke as behavior of getting upset, so coming down after they smoke becomes as
pay off of this behavior. The third way is how young people learn to smoke from
older people. For example, boys observe their parents who are smokers, so these
boys will learn how to smoke automatically from their parents.
Effects of smoking:
Smoking causes a lot of effects on
people health such as their body system, respiratory system, and also passive
smoker who are nonsmoker people. Many studies point out that there are a lot of
dangerous problems which can smoke cause especially on respiratory system. “The
acute effects of cigarette smoke upon the respiratory tract include: (1) a
depression of function in the ciliae lining the airway; (2) a stimulation of
mucus production by the goblet cells of the bronchial lining; (3) a varying
amount of bronchospasm. Chronic exposure may cause chronic bronchitis,
emphysema and various forms of lung cancer” (Shephard, 1982, 73). And also, there
are many symptoms of health effects on the respiratory system, especially upon
children such as “wheezing, coughing, and sputum production, are increased in children
of smoking parents” (National Research Council, 1986, 9). Beside that smoking
can cause lung cancer for nonsmoking people and this is what some studies found
out, “among studies of various populations in Europe, Asia, and North America,
the risk of lung cancer is roughly 30% higher for nonsmoking spouses of smoker
than it is for nonsmoking spouses of nonsmokers” (National Research Council,
1986, 10).
Smokers should notice that smoking not only
causes problems in respiratory system, but also causes some damage in their
body system. There are some serious effects on smoker’s body. One of these
effects is “every exposure to tobacco, from occasional smoking or secondhand
smoke, can damage DNA in ways that lead to cancer” (Szabo, 2011, 15B).
In this effect we can see clearly the biggest problem which smoking can do for
smokers. In addition to that, smoking can cause the most dangerous health
effect which is heart attack. And also, smoking can make negative effects on
women especially pregnant women. According to Stratton (2001), there is health
effect of smoking on pregnant women especially in rate of birth which means the
rate of birth will go down if pregnant women have exposure to any kind of
tobacco during the pregnancy period.
Now there is an important question
someone might ask: are there any health effects for secondhand smoke? The
answer is yes; there are many health effects can smoke cause upon passive
smoking people such as heart attack and lung cancer. “Under conditions of poor
ventilation, non-smokers could inhale the equivalent of the smoking of four
cigarettes over the course of a single hour; on this basis, benzpyrene from
regular and heavy passive exposure would cause two cases of lung cancer per
year in a group of 100,000 non-smokers” (Shephard, 1982, 95). Moreover, smoking
can make children at risk from passive exposure to cigarette smoke. According
to Shephard (1982), children are attacked from both air pollutants and
respiratory pathogens due to a high respiratory minute volume of body mass; and
infants probably have no chance to move away from a chain-smoking mother.
In conclusion,
Smoking is not a good thing for our community, especially when we know all of
the serious effects of smoking. As well we already know the causes of smoking
which can help us to find a way to protect the next generation from fall into
this terrible disease. Moreover, quitting smoking is not too tough for smokers,
who have willpower, to quit smoking by following the proper program for them to
quit smoking. Smokers will find themselves having a healthy life just as normal
people if they quit smoking soon. Of course, causes of smoking might be
different from person to another, but we can work to support smokers to quit by
following ways of quit smoking. Last but not least, we should know that
prevention is better than treatment.
References
Kish, G. (1988). Quit
smoking painlessly. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc.
National Research
Council. (1986). Environmental tobacco smoke: Measuring exposures and
assessing health effects. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
Pampel, F. (2004). Tobacco industry and
smoking. New York, NY: Facts on File, Inc.
Shephard, R.
(1982). The risks of passive smoking. Manuka, Australia: Croom Helm Ltd.
Stratton, K, (2001 ) Clearing the
Smoke: Assessing the Science Base for Tobacco Harm Reduction. Washington, D.C; National Academies Press, 2001.
Szabo, L (2010) Report: Just one cigarette is
bad. The
Miami times, 88 (17), 15
