The Good and Bad Effects of Smoking

Smoking is good for in many ways including making you live longer. Although most text books and “experts” say that smoking is bad for you, there are also many other people who disagree and say it has many curing properties. For example, a person with bronchitis from childhood accompanied by marked wheezing was told by doctors not to smoke. He was then told by an old country doctor that he used to be like him until he took up the pipe. Then he tried smoking and it reduced his bronchitis by far and reduced his cough. He claims that he is sure he would be dead long ago if he hadn’t taken up smoking. In the old days smoking was prescribed to patients who had asthma but now it has gone out of fashion.

More allergies are developed in non-smokers or people who give up smoking than smokers. Many severe bronchitis patients find that their first cigarette of the day clears their lungs and get rid of all their sputum for the next few hours. The nicotine relaxes the muscles in the bronchial walls keeping them at the right tension. It also reduces muscle tension in other parts of the body, reducing tension on the arteries, therefore reducing high blood pressure and heart disease. It also reduces the appetite, there for reducing obesity. Nicotine improves concentration in periods of long-lasting stress and satisfies people in bad temperaments.

Why Smoking is Bad for You

Many experts claim and have proof that smoking is very bad for you. Smoking involves the burning of tobacco in a pipe, cigar, or cigarette. The reason smokers feel relaxed smoking is because the nicotine in tobacco is a very addictive alkaloid. In the U.S.A alone tobacco use kills 420,000 smokers each year. Nicotine has been proven to affect the chemistry of the brain. Information is transmitted in the brain between nerve cells by the chemical acetylcholine. Nicotine which resembles the same shape as acetylcholine and interferes with the nerve system therefore stimulating the nervous system giving the smoker an initial physical lift. Cigarette smoke also has many other bad affects and consists of more than 4,700 chemical compounds.

A few of these affects are listed: cardiac poison, cancer causing agents, industrial solvents that causes heart disease, strokes, lung disease, cancer, birth defects etc…. Inhaling the hot toxic fumes burns the lining of the air passages therefore reducing the person’s ability to fight of diseases. The large particles of the smoke also form a corrosive tar layer in the lungs exposing the smoker to the cigarette’s dangerous chemicals. Passive smoking has been proven in 1986 to have caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths in non-smokers.

My view

Although the ‘Smoking is Good for You’ essay was very convincing I think only some the facts were true. I agree that smoking reduces obesity because I have never seen a smoker who is extremely over weight. I also believe it does relax people but I don’t think smoking’s other consequences make it worth taking it up. I think smoking would be good for people who have severe pain or stress problems but only for them. Overall I think that there are far more bad points to smoking than good and I do believe that people will live longer as a non-smoker because of all of its side affects such as heart disease and lung cancer.