Banning Smoking in public places

Banning Smoking in public places

Have you ever stopped to think about the dangers of smoking? Did you ever put in your consideration about other people who are affected by your smoking? Many people think that smoking gives them the feeling of satisfaction and happiness. Other people thinks that smoking makes the to calm down when they are angry, but all of this is nonsense. Smoking is a picked up as a habit by the youth in an unusual way. This habit risks their life and makes them prone to dreadful diseases. So if you are keen to kill yourself, then it’s your own choice, but, your freedom ends when other people’s freedom begins. Smoking is a very dangerous activity done by most of the people around the world which causes several health, environmental, and social problems. As a result, the WHO decided to pass a law to prohibit smoking in public places to protect people and the environment from the dangers of smoking.

Heavy smokers are likely to health problems which they can’t figure it out until it reaches a late stage. Researches made by scientists proofed that tobacco is one of the most addictive substances on earth. Every cigarette a smoker smokes supplies the body with great amounts of carcinogen and hazardous chemical substances. “A heavy smoker, who usually consume from 1 to 2 packs of cigarettes per day inhales 150,000 dose of poisonous smoke yearly.” [1]These Toxic compounds are formed when tobacco reacts with fire. Therefore Nicotine and the other dangerous chemicals formed while smoking are the most harmful things in cigarettes which causes severe health problems.

Another Dangerous health problem caused by smoking is Lung Cancer. This is because cigarettes contain over 80 different cancer-causing substances. Scientists showed that these substances could damage the body’s DNA and change their characteristics. This process leads the cells to grow and multiply out of control causing blockage in vital areas in the lung. A smoker could avoid all of these problems and live at ease just by giving up smoking.

The pollution caused by cigarettes does not stop in our bodies or the air; it also affects the land we live on and the water that we drink. Millions of cigarette butts are thrown onto the ground every day. They finally end up in the rivers and lakes where fish and animals -by mistake- eat them and quite often die from it. The rest are left on the ground to decompose which will take an average of 25 years while all of the chemicals and additives leach into the ground and pollute the soil and the plants. If you are going to smoke please consider this information before your throw your cigarette butts on the ground. It looks unattractive, it is a major fire hazard in dry weather, and it is extremely harmful to the environment.

Another impacting aspect of cigarettes is in producing them. The land used for growing the tobacco all over the world could be used for planting trees or food for starving children in the 3rd world’s countries. Tobacco plants are often sprayed with great amounts of harmful pesticides and chemicals as tobacco is very fragile plant and likely to pick up disease. A lot of trees are also used in producing and packing cigarettes. They use 4 miles of paper an hour just for rolling and packaging cigarettes. Every 100 cigaratte produced waste in the other hand a tree. The trees used in the cigarettes could be filtering out the pollutants found in the air instead of being chopped down for manufacturing a new cigarette.

Cigarette smokers have a common belief between them. They think that they only hurt themselves, in fact they hurt all the people surrounding them, people they love and the environment. Your freedom ends when the freedom of others begins. This say delivers the meaning directly. It means that its prohibited to go beyond others scope. This means smokers can’t take the action of smoking only if he isn’t going to hurt anyone around him.

As a result, some countries governments decided to completely ban smoking in public areas to protect the environment and people from the dangers caused by the smokers. A great number of mostly developed countries have enacted bans on smoking in public places or workplaces since the early 2000s. The first building in the world to have a smoke-free policy was the Old Government Building in Wellington, New Zealand in 1876. In 1990, the city of San Luis Obispo, California, became the first city in the world to ban indoor smoking at all public places, including bars and restaurants. Arguably by allowing smoking in public places it is the freedom of non-smokers that is being restricted. By smoking in public the smoker is forcing everyone in the vicinity to smoke too, perhaps there should be signs everywhere reading ‘public smoking area only’. This banning prohibition law was in the interest of non-smokers as they are able now to go to public buildings and finish their official transactions without being hurt by smokers around them.

There are 3 million victims yearly in the world die on account of cigarette smoking. Why don’t we all start from today to reduce the numbers of smokers to protect our lives from the slow killing substance called tobacco? Why don’t we start living green and stop affecting ourselves and our environment from the smoking circumstances? A problem that needs to pause and re-calculations so that we would not target and regret for what happened as a result of smoking.

[1] http://healthcare-guidance.blogspot.com/2009/11/effect-of-cigarette-in-our-health.html