While smoking is pleasurable or relaxing for some people, it is also unhealthy and unsafe. The economic and health impacts of smoking affect smokers and nonsmokers, including developing fetuses and children.
These widespread consequences make the individual choice to smoke cigarettes a public hazard. The most disastrous consequence is death. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), smoking causes about one in every five deaths per year in the United States.
Personal Health Risk
The cumulative effects of smoking cigarettes reach every part of a smoker's body. New evidence in 2004 prompted U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona to remind people that cigarette toxins affect all systems in the body. This explains why smokers have an increased risk for health problems that include lung disease and cancers of the mouth, larynx and lungs.
Besides bronchitis, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, tobacco use has been proven to contribute to heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, cataracts, periodontitis and cancers of the stomach, pancreas, cervix and kidneys. Smokers also suffer from a higher rate of infertility than nonsmokers.
Quality of Life
The CDC reports that most smokers are addicted to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes eventually decreases physical endurance, making exercise and even normal physical activity more difficult by inhibiting oxygen circulation and altering breathing patterns. This decrease in heart and lung function can severely restrict mobility.
The American Lung Association points out myriad aggravations that accompany the health problems brought on by tobacco use. Smoking is expensive, time consuming and increasingly inconvenient due to bans on smoking in public places such as restaurants in many cities. It dulls the senses of smell and taste. Smokers become less attractive to other people due to snoring, smelling "stale," and appearing unhealthy. The American Academy of Dermatology notes that smoking causes the skin to wrinkle heavily and take on a yellowish tinge.
Secondhand Smoke Harm
Secondhand smoke affects adults who don't indulge in the habit. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services relates that nonsmokers' risks for health problems such as heart disease and lung cancer can grow, even if they never light up or inhale secondhand smoke. Nicotine particles on a smoker's clothing, hair and household environment can be transferred to nonsmokers through contact.
The CDC notes that the effects of smoking cigarettes on fetuses and children are more severe. Fetuses exposed to nicotine through parental tobacco use are more likely to experience premature birth, have low birth weight or be stillborn. Secondhand smoke is now known to cause Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
