Smoking and Our Health

A cigarette is a product consumed through smoking and manufactured out of cured and finely combined with other addictives, then rolled into a paper. The graph below shows what cigarette is made out of.



The Smoke free Environments Regulations are made in 2007 under the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990. These regulations include the new labelling cigarettes and other tobacco products. (E.g. packages displaying graphic pictorial health warnings like the picture below)



But people still consume cigarettes because nicotine in a cigarette is very addictive. Also the young people smoke cigarettes because it is still a fashion for them. It looks cojavascript:void(0)ol when the grown-ups smoking cigarettes at the balcony and the famous actors puffing on cigarette in the movie. And they think that the cigarette is like a symbol of being a part of the grown-ups. So eventually the children follow the bad role models and get trapped into the addiction of the cigarettes, and one day they become the models of the bad parents. So I think this bad routine won't change unless there is a fantastic idea to make it stop.

Here is one of the fantastic ideas which I found from the New Zealand Herald. This method was used in Essex, the eastern England to stop the pregnant women from smoking. The pregnent women were offered up to £100 (NZ$224) in food vouchers on the NHS if they give up smoking. These offers are increasingly used to persuade people to change their unhealthy habits. “One of the highest rewards was offered by General Electric in the United States to staff who stopped smoking. They were paid up to US$750(NZ$1237).

So it shouldn’t be too hard to quit smoking if they think of the way. One way could be the reward and another way could be to set a deadline to stop smoking like a deadline to finish an assignment. It is easier to accomplish something when it is all planed. There is an article about the new quit time set by researcher of Auckland University. The research reveals that “pregnant women who smoke up to 15 weeks face no more risk of having a pre-term and small baby than if they had not smoked at all. But if they continue to smoke beyond that period they are three times more likely to have a baby born pre-term, and twice as likely to have an underweight baby.” I believe that this article will encourage a lot of women who has given up quitting smoking.

New Zealand is also has been trying to do something about this problem. Manukau has introduced this new “smoke-free parks” policy started from March 18, 2009 which means all parks, playgrounds and sports fields in Manukau will be smoke-free. So we all know how bad cigarettes are to our body. It is so bad that it is banned from some public areas. Plus, it is so true that the horrible things from the pictures on cigarette package could actually happen to us if we smoke.

But the problem is that the people in the tobacco industry will lose their job if we ban the cigarette from the world. It will take a long time to accomplish this task. So while we do that, I’m sure there will be a solution to this problem as well. For example, the government could find them the new place to work in the different industries using its power over the economy.

However, some smokers would say that it is too hard to quit smoking completely. They say that it is difficult to resist when there are people smoking around them. They also say that smoking give them comfort and relaxation. So I went through some articles and I found an interesting article from MSN Japan. It is a Japanese version of MSN website. The article was about this wonderful invention of the "super cigarette". "Super cigarette" is a small piece of plastic and identified as an electronic cigarette. The picture of “super cigarette” is shown below.
Electronic cigarette is an alternative to the cigarette, providing small amounts of the chemical nicotine with each inhalation. So It is like smoking the real cigarette but with very small amount of chemicals. Some of the electronic cigarette even produces no chemicals at all. The smoke is created by the water and there is a filter inside which creates the “taste” of the cigarette. The price is around $100 per cigarette. It is quite expensive but it is reusable many times. Plus it is much healthier. So I believe this amazing product will save our lives and the environment.



The entire article I read about banning cigarette was strongly persuasive. If we all try to do something about it, I believe sooner or later the cigarette will join the illegal drugs.