The Production and Sale of Tobacco Products Should Be Made Illegal

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October 31, 2011 The Production and Sale of Tobacco Products Should be Made Illegal in the United States I believe that the production and sale of cigarettes in the United States should be made illegal. As a former smoker myself, I have come to believe everyone should quit. When I first stopped smoking I thought the reasons to stop were pretty simple. I thought about the bad smell of cigarettes, the high cost of smoking, the litter of cigarette butts that I saw everywhere, and of course the risks to your own and other peoples health. But the thought of making the production and sale of cigarettes illegal is a more recent belief. I have come to this conclusion because I do not believe that people will stop using cigarettes just because of the health risks that are well publicized and well known. Some of these statistics are given in a very bold way by the National Institute on Drug Abuse: “Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of disease, disability, and death in the United States. Between 1964 and 2004, cigarette smoking caused an estimated 12 million deaths, including 4.1 million deaths from cancer, 5.5 million deaths from cardiovascular diseases, 1.1 million deaths from respiratory diseases, and 94,000 infant deaths related to mothers smoking during pregnancy.1 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cigarette smoking results in more than 443,000 deaths in the United States each year – about one in every five U.S. Deaths – and an additional 8.6 million people suffer with a serious illness caused by smoking. Thus, for every one person who dies from smoking, twenty more suffer from at least one serious tobacco-related illness.” (NIDA News, NIDA Infofacts: “Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products” http://drugabuse.gov/infofacts/tobacco.htm, Oct. 30, 2011) Although you might think these facts might be enough to

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