Most young people think its all good, a smoke with my friends it cant do any harm, but one person dies in the UK every four and a half minutes due to a smoking related disease and I do not think a quick spark up to impress your friends is worth losing your life over. A lot of people may say to you now, you’re a very pretty young girl or a handsome young man, and you’ll get loads of boyfriends or girlfriends well if you keep smoking, your fingers will turn yellow, your teeth will go yellow, your gums will be harmed which means you have more chance of your teeth falling out at an earlier age when you get older and by the time you are about 50 you will look about 70 as smoking also increases the amount of wrinkles you will get .
Smoking can damage your relationships with other people in two ways the first way is when you have a close friend or even a boyfriend or girlfriend and they do not smoke you might drive them away from you with the fact that you smoke, as most people are turned by smoking and what it does to your body. When you meet a new friend you will probably judge them by how they look, dress, smell and other things before you really get to know them better. If someone was walking down a street and there was someone walking beside them and all they could smell was smoke and they turned to look at them and they had a cigarette hanging out of their mouth it wouldn’t look very attractive. Would you like to make friends with a person like this? Another way in which it affects relationship is that it affects the sexual relationship between two people. A man will have less a chance of having an erection if he is a smoker as a healthy blood flow is needed to erect the penis but the nicotine from a cigarette damages the artery walls which makes it harder for more blood to get through so it damages the mans chances of an erection.
In our society an experiment was carried out and if you took 1,000 young smokers that had a twenty a day habit of smoking and range from an age of about 11-16 one child will probably get murdered six children will die on roads and around 333 children will die from smoking related diseases and from this I can tell you that about four hundred and fifty people aged between 10 and fourteen will start smoking everyday in the UK. You may think that there is only a few diseases you can get from smoking like lung cancer and cancer but there are loads that include mouth cancer, throat cancer, lung cancer and more. Smoking can cause heart attacks, sudden death, strokes and a host of other problems. 50% of smokers will be killed by their habit.
A person on a 20-a-day habit will spend about two thousand pounds a year on cigarettes alone; think of what you can buy with that. If you stopped smoking for 6 months you could buy a return ticket to the U.S.A! It’s amazing what you can do when you’re not huddled in a corner trying to disguise the fact from passers by that you are smoking.
Now the subject of passive smoking This weekend when you are standing with your friends and you light a cigarette look and see how many people there do not smoke, even thought there might be one person or maybe even ten you are damaging this persons health, you might cry and weep if anything ever happened to them and you might despise any one who tries to hurt them but think again, your that person. They might even end up in hospital because of the smoke they are inhaling from your cigarette and the other people with cigarettes around them. It is also proven that people that live with parents or others that smoke it will increase their chances of dying from lung cancer by a shocking 26%. So if you have a baby sister or brother and your mum and dad smokes, you might think they would do anything to stop you from getting hurt like your friends but they are killing you and you baby brother or sister, no matter what age from one week to one month old children can still breathe in the smoke and at no matter what age it can affect their lungs. 200 people die in the UK from passive smoking every year so do something about it before it does something to your family or friends.
This might sound a bit far-fetched but when you smoke the food you eat tastes a bit smokier to you than it does to non-smokers. It is proven that non-smokers enjoy the taste of their food more than smokers as they get the full taste and not just a Smokey texture.
When you smoke you are not just killing yourself you are killing the people around you. If you want to stop and think you can’t, try your best you never know what you can do with the right support. Tell one of your friends your stopping and they will help you. Maybe even go down to your local health clinic and ask for some friendly advice, or if you are too embarrassed to go to your local health centre, phone them up, there are listings for most of the health centers in northern Ireland in the yellow pages, there is also the smokers helpline started by the government to help people give up smoking and the number for that is 0800 85 85 85. If you give up smoking you will improve your breathing so you’ll do better in your physical subjects in school, your physical appearance will improve so you’ll meet new friends and you never know your life might just improve!
// NICOLA MC CONVILLE 11F MISS SMITH ENGLISH //