Dwight Scott
6 February 2012
English 1200-78
Mellisa
Tetterton
Want health problems? Easy, smoke cigarettes
Who
would have ever known that by taking a plant named tobacco, shredding it, and
rolling it into a thin piece of paper would have become one of the most used
items in America today? Every day many
will see a cigarette and the smoke produced, possibly taste or smell it, or
even step on a cigarette. Cigarettes
contain more than 4000 chemical compounds and at least 400 toxic substances
(Macnair). Everyone in America usually
know how harmful a cigarette is, yet they still want to smoke due to the
addiction and stress involved in their life.
The mistake for a human being to smoke it is not even worth it because
of the potential of the substance to increase cancer, longevity, and various
other health related problems. Smoking
is getting worse every day, and killing the quality of life for people that smoke,
but is there really a solution to this never ending problem people have gotten
themselves into? Cigarette smoking causes
various health problems, is addicting, causes second hand smoke, and a hard to quit.
The best solution to this problem is to just ban cigarette smoking in all
public places. Smoking cigarettes are an unhealthy habit and is affecting the
ones around them that don’t smoke (especially children).
If
a person wants to smoke a cigarette you are to only be allowed to smoke it on
your personal land. Places like clubs,
restaurants, and working environments are just not the time or place to have
the need to take a cigarette out and smoke it.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that
it would spend $600 million over five years to educate the public about the
dangers of tobacco use (Singer). Peter
Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate
Professor at the University of Melbourne.
Singer is an informative and persuasive author and through his article
tries to let people know that many smokers would not mind the ban of cigarettes
due to the fact that it would help them to quit. He interacts with his audience by using the
president Barrack Obama as a prime example because Singer throughout his paper
says that smokers would like to see cigarettes banned because like Barrack did,
they want to quit. Therefore, his
audience is the people in the U.S trying to quit smoking cigarettes. His purpose is to persuade people the best
solutions to quit smoking, and he does so by providing descriptive detail, and
examples. The author believe in Peter Singers ethos appeals due to
his acknowledgment of higher education and he conducted good research by
providing back up points and facts to his views. The only warrants the author wants his audience
to accept that people would find hard is his credibility, because he provides great
statistics and information but people have no idea where the information is coming
from by lacking sources/references. The
government may not be able to ban the cigarette use completely at first but it
can start somewhere, by starting the ban in only public places.
Not
only are cigarettes a terrible item to get addicted to but along with the
constant smoking comes various types of health related problems, disease, and
possibly cancer. Ninety percent of lung cancer
cases are due to smoking (Macnair). Cardiovascular
disease is the main cause of death due to smoking (Macnair). These statistics and information is why it is
easy to see that smoking cigarettes is not worth it due to all of the health problems
it will bring to the body. Dr Patricia
Macnair is writing about various health problems that happen when you begin to
smoke and helpful tips if you are trying to quit. Her audience is the society as a whole or
anyone interested in health concerns when smoking. Dr. Macnair’s purpose is to inform the
society about smoking health risk so that nobody that reads her article and
smokes can say they do not know the health concerns that come with it. She uses
a lot of informative description throughout her article and makes it somewhat
believable. The reason it is somewhat believable
is because you see all of the information being provided but do not know where
the information came from. Therefore,
can you trust it? Yes, the audience can
trust it because she is a doctor and does know what she is talking about, but
not knowing where the information is coming from makes it questionable. The appeal she uses throughout her article is
logos because she uses logic to reason her claim and her reasoning includes
many facts and statistics. The reason a
cigarette is able to cause so much damage is due to the material inside of
it. A cigarette contains nicotine,
carbon monoxide, tar, and gas. Not only
due these bad chemicals in your body cause disease and cancer, but will also
give you bad breathe, asthma, high blood pressure, and sickness. Is small buzz (pleasure) from a cigarette
worth the many health issues that comes along with it? It’s also popular for women that are pregnant
to smoke cigarettes because they are so addicted to it they can not get off of
it, and this leads to babies dying or being born with health/mental
issues. “Smokers who are trying to kick
their habit may be disappointed to find there's no single quit method that
guarantees success” (Macnair). Although
you may have started your bad smoking habits it is not too late to still get
your health back and the best way to do this is to quit smoking cigarettes in
general.
Because there is no exact way to
quit or any procedure to follow, quitting smoking is a hard task to
accomplish. Smoking bans will have
positive help on smokers trying to reduce the amount of cigarettes they smoke
because it limits their time to do it.
For example, if John is trying to quit smoking cigarettes the best thing
for him is to get his mind off of the idea of smoking. That way he is prone hopefully not to smoke as
much. Well, if every time he is not home
he knows he is not able to smoke because he is not allowed, then hopefully it
will lead him to forget about the whole smoking idea. Yes he will be able to still smoke at his
house but we must hope that he will decrease his intake at home and be able to
just completely get off of it. This
method will not only help the health of the public from dangerous hazards, but
it should also be able to save many lives!
The biggest problem with smoking cigarettes and trying to quit is the
nicotine in the cigarette. Nicotine is
highly addictive and very hard to get off of once it gets inside ones body and
brain. The feeling and it leaves and the
temporary escape it provides leaves people craving for more and more
cigarettes. For instance, let us say
David has had a hard day in school filled with test and he is stressed out with
a headache because he does not know how well he did on the test. David then remembers he has a pack of
cigarettes in his back pocket, so he takes them out and smokes two. After smoking he realizes the headache is
gone and he is now stress free thanks to the help of some cigarettes. This is the addictive problem most people who
smoke Americans face each and every day, and this has to stop.
Second hand smoke affects the health of the public yet;
the government wants to ignore the situation, instead of taking the necessary
steps to solve it. Secondhand smoke is a
toxic cocktail consisting of poisons and carcinogens. There are over 4000
chemical compounds in secondhand smoke; 200 of which are known to be poisonous,
and upwards of 60 have been identified as carcinogens (Martin). Terry Martin the author of this specific
article smoked for 26 years, and is now relieved of the addiction. She knows a great deal about smoking and the
struggle it takes to quit. Terry
specifically writes about the effects of second hand smoke on an individuals
health and her life experiences influenced her to write about this topic. Her purpose is to show people how bad the
cigarette really is and that they should quit as soon as possible. Her goal is to open society’s eyes about
second hand smoking, and she does a good job doing this. She also uses logos for her credibility
because it is logical and uses persuasive reason to back up her claim. An example of her use of logos is “Heart
disease mortality – an estimated 35, 000 to 62, 000 deaths are caused from
heart disease in people who are not current smokers, but who are exposed to
ETS” and this use of logos shows how logical/statistical her article is. The author is not writing toward a specific
person or group, but rather the society as a whole. Martin’s article was reviewed by a medical
review board and the details provided in the article do not seem unbelievable
in any way. About half of the smoke is
inhaled when your smoking and the other half is exhaled out into the
environment for anyone else to capture and absorb. Adults and children that inhale that second
hand smoke are subjected to receive cancer, heart issues, and other health
problems. By having smokers only smoke
at their private property and not in public places, this will help the people
in public that hate smoking. For
instance, some people are totally against the idea of smoking and damn sure do
not want it being blown in their face.
Why have your nonsmokers inhale secondhand smoke and experience the same
health risk a smoker faces? Therefore,
the government needs to step up in this situation because it is going to take
more than just telling smokers they can not smoke in public. For this reason, the government needs to
create some type of a fine or punishment for people still willing to smoke in
public. That way, smokers will feel more
pressure not to smoke and the people that smoke anyways are going to have to
pay a price. Now one might think this
seems easy but how could this statement be regulated? The police can regulate cigarettes the same
way they regulate marijuana now, except being caught with a cigarette will of
course be less of a punishment. If this
all works out the right way we should be able to eliminate the number of active
cigarette smokers due to the fact that they will have to pay a price/fine if caught
smoking it.
Let us say the sales of cigarettes really go down now
because the public does not have the urge to go buy tobacco they are only able
to smoke at their house. What are the
tobacco companies now supposed to do?
They were making all of this money off of tobacco plants but now less
money is being brought in. Tobacco
companies should then move away from the harmful plant tobacco and move toward
a medical and beneficial plant named cannabis.
This does not mean that marijuana will now be legal and sold to the
public in every store so that the access is easy. I say America can do this, have medical
marijuana clinic centers set up throughout the U.S in the major cities. Not everyone will be able to go to these
clinics because first a person of age 16 or up must visit a doctor and get
recommendation that they are now allowed to smoke the cannabis plant. The doctor will ask the patient various
questions in order to see if that patient is capable for the drug, and then
they will receive a card registered for them only that will allow them to buy cannabis
at clinics around the U.S. The doctor
should be looking for people that have either medical conditions or a previous
background of tobacco smoking. Therefore,
this whole process will have the tobacco smokers now transfer over to a less
harmful plant and get them off of the addiction of nicotine. Some individuals may ask what makes smoking marijuana
so much better than cigarettes. Well,
not one case of lung cancer has been linked to marijuana usage. Better yet not one case of death has been
linked to marijuana usage. Marijuana
smokers do not smoke anywhere near the amount cigarette smokers do. Marijuana does not contain the tar or
nicotine that a cigarette holds, therefore it’s not addictive. Marijuana contains THC (dilator) that opens
up your lungs and clears it off smoke and dirt, whereas nicotine does the
opposite. Cannabis is easy to grow and
reproduce and could be just as easily harvested by the government as the plant
tobacco was. So why does our government
feel the need to put the hazardous plant on our shelves, but keep the medically
used plant cannabis scarce and illegal.
It just does not make sense. Even
very heavy, long-term marijuana users who had smoked more than 22,000 joints
over a lifetime seemed to have no greater risk than infrequent marijuana users
or nonusers (Boyles). While
two-pack-a-day or more cigarette smokers were found to have a 20-fold increase
in lung cancer risk, no elevation in risk was seen for even the very heaviest
marijuana smokers (Boyles). Salynn Boyles is the author of the website
and is informing her audience about the fact that marijuana does not lead to
lung cancer. She interacts with her
audience by providing realistic examples that happen in life so that her
audience should find it easier to relate to the topic. Boyle’s purpose is to let her audience know
that marijuana is not as bad of a drug as the government puts it as. She is able to back up her purpose by
providing a lot of statistics and descriptive information. An example of a statistic being used would
be, “The heaviest marijuana users in the study had smoke more than 22, 000
joints, while moderated heavy smokers had smoked between 11, 000 and 22,000 joints.” She is writing to people who smoke marijuana
or cigarettes, people interested in the topic, the people against marijuana,
and certain people in the government that would deal with this issue. She speaks with a biased tone due to the fact
that she leans toward marijuana over cigarettes and is accurate when doing
so. This author does a good job showing
ethos by providing various references, therefore the readers are able to see
exactly where she is getting her information from. Also, she has her article reviewed by a
respected person named Dr. Louise
Chang who made her article even more credible.
Overall, she is asking society to basically take a step back and take a
different perspective on the drug marijuana than we had before, and that we
look at nicotine and cigarettes as more harmful. Boyles is specifically speaking to a certain
sector and that sector is people who think cigarettes are better for you than
marijuana is. All of the implications
the author provides makes it acceptable and believable due to the credibility
she was able to provide. Lastly, the
process/method works and there’s no smoking in public places and the U.S is
making an overall move away from the tobacco plant and toward the cannabis
plant. Not only would our overall health
be better but also the country would see more civil rest with the intake of cannabis. When smoking cannabis one does not want to
fight or argue. All you want to do is
enjoy life, laugh, have fun, peace, and love one another.
Our army was smoking weed and didn’t feel like
fighting, therefore President Roosevelt in 1937 made it illegal so that our
troops did feel like picking up a gun and feel like fighting for our
country. Is that the way it should
really be?
If
we all know that cigarette is a poison, why should we ever allow this menace to
exist in our country? A person smoking in public is a very bad
influence on younger people. The more young people are exposed to smoking the
better the chance they will become smokers themselves. Not only is it a bad influence but the second
hand smoke in public places is a terrible thought, because your giving the non
smokers around you the same effect a normal smoker would receive. Heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure,
and various other health problems, is this what a person wants to feed the
public bodies with? However, by placing
a ban on smoking in public places will help the health of our public and
hopefully eliminate the number of cigarettes a smoker smokes in a day. Not only would a ban on smoking places be
great, but also the government making a move away from tobacco plants towards
cannabis plans would be a great idea.
Nicotine and tar in cigarettes and the health problems they provide, far
exceeds the health problems for marijuana.
Therefore this would save many lives and make the world more
peaceful. People would receive a card
from a doctor so that way they would be able to visit a marijuana clinic and
receive weed to smoke. By doing so we
could get our Americans off of the harmful cigarettes and onto a drug that was
purposely made for medical reasons. So
what are we waiting for? Make this
country a better place and stop smoking deathly cigarettes!
Works Cited
Boyles, Salynn.
"Marijuana Does Not Raise Lung Cancer Risk." FoxNews.com.
N.p., 2012.
Web. 11
Feb 2012. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,196678,00.html>.
MacNair, Patricia .
"Smoking- Health Risk." netdoctor. N.p., 2/11/2011. Web. 11
Feb 2012.
<http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/health_advice/facts/smokehealth.htm>.
Martin, Terry . "About
Second Hand Smoke ." About.com. N.p., 7/10/2011. Web. 11 Feb 2012.
<http://quitsmoking.about.com/cs/secondhandsmoke/a/secondhandsmoke.htm>.
Singer, Peter . "Should
we ban cigarettes." CNN World . N.p., 9/14/2011. Web. 11 Feb
2012.
<http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/14/singer-should-we-ban-
cigarettes/>.
