Smoking: Lighting Up Someone's Life Instead of a Cigarette

Smoking is something that has troubled the American people and economy since its foundation. Trillions are spent on it and millions die from it, yet we still can’t seem to get it in our head that cigarettes kill. Coming from a family that always picks the no smoking section in any public facility we use, I’ve grown up from a standpoint that lives above the influence. My great grandparents were victims of the tobacco industry and the American mindset and it troubles me to see kids my own age sucking on a cancer stick.

Essentially I see a complicated conflict that involves money, lives, and culture. Tobacco has existed ever since the beginning years of American democracy and was to be exact, the first major cash crop and catalyst of what we have become today. However as history tells us, mistakes from the past are never meant to be repeated, yet we do it over and over again by lighting one up. First there are the tobacco companies, the trillion dollar industry that obviously thinks money is worth the death. One could say, “they aren’t forcing someone to kill themselves”, but to me, supplying it is all the same. Underneath those companies are the victims, those being us. College kids and American youth are by far the biggest target for tobacco advertising and prospective profit. If you think about it, why spend the time to addict adults when they’re one, harder to influence, and two, don’t have as much time in life to spend money on packs?

Parents and Non smokers are definitely two major groups of people that can identify with troubles in this issue. It would be interesting to get parental perspectives from smokers and how they feel about their habit growing on their children as well as from the kids themselves. Second hand smoke is yet another way to analyze how smoking truly affects an individuals surroundings. How exhaling the deadly chemicals in cigarettes can cause just as much or more harm to others is astounding.

Finally I want to explore the affects smoking truly has on the American economy. Some argue that banning smoking could have detrimental impacts as far as taxing and American GDP, yet some recent reports suggest that smoking itself causes about 47 million dollars in annual loss. I want to show people how to help each other out. We are living in a time where ignorance is a thing of the past. I want this project to develop into a different type of awareness, a sort of guide to help your friends to stop smoking. Not only do I want to inform others about this issue, I want to inform them how to stop it. We as a whole are always greater than the individual.