READING RAMOS



My dad committed suicide. No, he didn’t put a gun to his head and pull the trigger or anything that dramatic, but he did kill himself, just the same. Actually, he’s not even dead – yet. He will be soon. You see, he committed suicide the legal way, by smoking cigarettes for years. His type of suicide, the legal kind, is long, slow, and painful. He can barely walk or breathe. He’s had part of a lung removed. He now stashes his pain killers away – for when the cancer returns. No, that’s not legal. Ironic, isn’t it? The drug that ensured his death is still perfectly legal. I believe cigarettes should be made illegal.Cigarettes are an instrument of death. They are the only product currently on the market that when used as directed will kill you. Regrettably, more than 40 million American adults still smoke, and about 480,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a result of tobacco use (Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking). Nicotine kills more people each year than all other drugs combined, and that includes alcohol related car crashes. Simply put, smoking causes a whole host of preventable illnesses. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body, causing many diseases and reducing quality of life and life expectancy” (Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking). Cigarettes cause heart disease. Smoking causes hardening of the arteries which leads to heart attacks. The American Heart Association warns, “Many studies detail the evidence that cigarette smoking is a major cause of coronary heart disease, which leads to heart attack” (Smoking & Cardiovascular Disease). My father smoked for years. When he had barely turned sixty, he had to have six arteries by-passed. A couple of years later, while still smoking, he had to have a stint put into one of his bypasses in order to keep it open. Smoking also causes multiple types of lung disease. It causes lung cancer and emphysema. It causes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). It causes chronic bronchitis and pneumonia. The American Lung Association asserts, “Smoking is directly responsible for approximately 90 percent of lung cancer deaths and approximately 80-90 percent of COPD (emphysema and chronic bronchitis) deaths” (General Smoking Facts). My father has all of these lung diseases. He got out of breath just walking up one flight of stairs. The oncologist he saw for his lung cancer told him that his type of lung cancer was caused almost exclusively by smoking. Smoking also contributes to other types of cancer. Cigarette smoking accounts for at least 30% of all cancer deaths. It is a major cause of cancers of the lung, larynx (voice box), oral cavity, pharynx (throat), and esophagus, and it is a contributing cause in the development of cancers of the bladder, pancreas, liver, uterine cervix, kidney, stomach, colon and rectum, and some leukemias (What kinds of illness and death are caused by smoking cigarettes?).Smoking also harms others. Breathing in smoke from another’s cigarette, often called “secondhand smoke,” can lead to lung cancer. According to the CDC, “Secondhand smoke is the combination of smoke from the burning end of a cigarette and the smoke breathed out by smokers. Secondhand smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals. Hundreds are toxic and about 70 can cause cancer” (Health Effects of Secondhand Smoke). It can also cause heart disease. Secondhand smoke causes nearly 34,000 premature deaths from heart disease each year in the United States among nonsmokers (Health Effects of Secondhand Smoke). A child who is exposed to secondhand smoke is more likely to die from SIDs (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Children of smokers are more likely to develop asthma and other breathing difficulties. Statistics bear this out. There are 8,000 to 26,000 new cases of asthma in children and 200,000 to 1 million cases of asthma flare ups in children each year (Facts about secondhand smoke). According to the CDC, “Studies show that older children whose parents smoke get sick more often. Their lungs grow less than children who do not breathe secondhand smoke, and they get more bronchitis and pneumonia” (Health Effects of Secondhand Smoke). I am living proof of this. Both of my parents smoked when I was growing up. As a child, I suffered severe bouts of pneumonia which left scarring on my lungs. Children of smokers are also more likely to suffer more upper respiratory infections and ear infections. In one study, children who lived in homes where there were two or more cigarette smokers during the first three years of life had an 85 percent higher than normal history of persistent or recurrent middle ear infections (Ear infections in children linked to secondhand smoke). In fact, 700,000 physician visits a year can be attributed to exposure to second –hand smoke (Facts about secondhand smoke). The physical ills caused by living with a smoker are only one problem that children of smokers must endure. They must endure watching their parents die a long, slow, painful death. I watched my father deteriorate steadily over his last few years. Towards the end, he could no longer drive up for a visit. He couldn’t even go out to eat with us when we went to visit him. He did not live long enough to see either of my children graduate from high school. My mother suffers a similar fate. She has pulmonary fibrosis caused by smoking. Scar tissue is slowly replacing her lung tissue. One day, she won’t have enough lung tissue left to breathe and she will suffocate to death. I will lose both of my parents to a drug which trapped them into a cycle of addiction at an early age.Smoking is expensive to both the smoker and society. The cost of cigarettes keeps increasing. A smoker spends a lot of money to maintain his habit, and this is money that could better be spent elsewhere. Depending on where he or she lives, a pack-a-day smoker who quits will, on average, annually save $1,610 to $3,750. In Virginia, the annual amount that the average adult smoker would save by quitting is $2,190 (Boonn). The costs to the smoker are not the only costs of this vile drug. Businesses lose countless dollars each year as smokers miss work due to their continuing illnesses. Employers must also pay steeper medical premiums in order to pay for their smoker’s medical costs. And what about after the smoker retires? Who pays for his/her medical costs? The taxpayers. More than $289 billion a year, including at least $133 billion in direct medical care for adults and more than $156 billion in lost productivity (Smoking and Tobacco Use). The taxpayers pay for a good portion of this. The annual federal and state government smoking-caused Medicaid payments are $39.6 billion. The federal share of this is $22.5 billion per year. The states’ share is $17.1 billion. The federal government smoking-caused Medicare expenditures each year run $45.0 billion. Then there are other federal government tobacco-caused health care costs, like the VA health car, which costs taxpayers $23.8 billion per year. Add in the costs for secondhand smoke treatment which is $6.03 billion (Toll of Tobacco in the United States of America). The taxpayers funded my father’s lung cancer surgery. They also pay for his daily dialysis treatment and his diabetic medicines. They pay for his countless pills. They will also have to foot the bill should he need to go into a nursing home, a very costly bill. The same is true of my mother. Taxpayers eventually foot the bill for every smoker. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to ban the costly drug?I know that some people will say that no one puts a gun to a smoker’s head and forces him/her to start smoking. This is true. However, once a person tries a cigarette, the addiction begins. It has been said that nicotine is more addictive than heroin. According to the New York Times, “Scientists have found, for instance, that nicotine is as addictive as heroin, cocaine or amphetamines, and for most people more addictive than alcohol” (Blakeslee). Dr. Sharon Hall asserts, ''Heroin addicts say it is easier to give up dope than it is to give up smoking'' (Blakeslee). And the manufacturers of cigarettes are constantly increasing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes in order to make them more addictive. When makers of the patch and nicotine gum come out with stronger products, the makers of cigarettes up the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to make them have more than the patch or gum. In two separate studies, one by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the other by the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers found that nicotine levels in cigarettes from all major manufacturers increased 11 percent from 1997 to 2005 (Layton). Cigarette manufacturers also target young people who are more susceptible to their marketing ploys. The tobacco industry spends $24 million a day advertising their product. Research studies have found that kids are three times as sensitive to tobacco advertising than adults and are more likely to be influenced to smoke by cigarette marketing than by peer pressure; and that a third of underage experimentation with smoking is attributable to tobacco company advertising and promotion. In addition, the tobacco industry spends $16.6 lobbying Congress and donates over $1.6 million to political candidates. That’s a lot of money spent peddling death (The Global Cigarette Industry).Another argument opponents of banning tobacco make is that it would put a lot of people out of business. People have been smoking less and less over the years. This is something that everyone has seen coming. Currently, we export more cigarettes than we sell in our own nation. We could allow the export of the cigarettes. More than 80% of the world’s smokers live in low- and middle-income countries, and the tobacco industry is increasingly targeting these emerging markets (The Global Cigarette Industry). We could also offer tax incentives for farmers to grow something else, like food. Cigarette factories could be converted to factories that produce something useful, like food, drugs, or other products. Nicotine itself is a terrific insecticide. It is an alkaloid found in plants. This alkaloid kills insects by disrupting their neurotransmitters, substances released by the bug's activated nerve cells (Blakeslee). Why not just grow tobacco for that purpose? Another use for tobacco is vaccines. Genetically altered tobacco plants can grow vast quantities of in a shorter period of time than conventional egg based vaccines CITATION San13 \l 1033 (Rice).If the government decided to make smoking illegal tomorrow, it would still be too late for my parents. But it isn’t too late for the countless people addicted to smoking. We should help them end their addiction to death, and we should prevent others from becoming addicted to the toxic death sticks. Simply put, smoking should be illegal.Works CitedBlakeslee, Sandra. "Nicotine: Harder to Kick than Heroin." 29 March 1987. The New York Times. Web. 19 February 2015.Boonn, Ann. "Immediate Smoker Savings From Quitting in Each State." 23 December 2014. Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. Web. 19 February 2015."Ear infections in children linked to secondhand smoke." 10 February 1998. CNN . Web. 19 February 2015."Facts about secondhand smoke." n.d. American Lung Association. Web. 11 March 2016."General Smoking Facts." June 2011. American Lung Association. Web. 19 February 2015."Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking." 17 February 2016. Centers for Disease Control. Web. 19 February 2015. ................
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