Should Smoking Be Banned?

1534 Words7 Pages
Should Smoking be banned? Smoking is a practice that has been used for many years. It consists in inhaling the smoke and expelling it through the mouth or nose. Smoking is a bad habit that some people have and it is becoming a bigger problem day after day as it affects the environment, which consequently affects the people’s health. It also affects the country’s economy and people’s finances. This problem can be reduced if some effort is exerted by smokers to quit smoking and possible air purification methods are designed. Since smoke is a gas, it mainly pollutes the air. We should consider the whole process, from the growth of the tobacco plants until the consumption of a cigarette that helps pollute the waters and land as well. Tobacco is addictive because it contains nicotine which constitutes approximately 0.6–3.0 % of dry weight of tobacco (“Nicotine-What is Nicotine?) The tobacco plants are sensitive plants vulnerable to pests and diseases, therefore to assure their proper growth they need to be sprayed with large amounts of pesticides and chemicals. All those chemicals filter through the soil polluting the soil and later on they reach underground water reservations. To produce cigarettes an industry needs per hour approximately 6500 meters of paper, this means that to produce 300 cigarettes a tree is destroyed (“How Smoking Affects the Environment”). Cigarettes are normally produced in one area therefore they need to be transported. The transportation is mostly done by trucks and they emit carbon dioxide. The last stage would be consumption, and here we would have more than 4000 chemicals being emitted to the atmosphere released by lightened cigars (“What’s in a Cigarette?”). All this talk about pollution makes us think about a phenomenon that is endangering life on earth, global warming. Global warming is caused by high emissions of carbon dioxide
Open Document