Tobacco: A Threat to Development
Tobacco, consumed worldwide in various smoked and smokeless forms, is now proved scientifically by various researches and investigations to be a definite carcinogen and an abetting factor for hundreds of health hazards.
With aggressive marketing strategies and alluring advertisements tobacco producers aim at producing more and more tobacco dependent teenagers who succumb to the habit throughout their lives. And we play a conducive role in fulfilling their goal by exposing the children to tobacco every day to such an extent that they will somehow believe that all grown-ups do smoke/consume tobacco and so should he when he becomes one. This social impact of smoking is more deleterious than we believe it to be. Raising children in such a tobacco-ridden environment without them actually picking up the habit is very challenging to parents and to-be-parents.
Tobacco consumption is socially accepted to be benign as it does not cause immediate harsh effects. And, we are too myopic to foresee the long-term hazards of smoking be it physical, social, economic and emotional. But, the dire consequences of tobacco consumption shouldn't be underestimated.
Millions of lives are lost, billions of working hours are lost, and trillions of dollars are lost for the treatment and care of the patients who suffered their ill fate due to tobacco consumption. Economic burden of tobacco consumption not only comprises of the money that is spent on buying the tobacco products, the money that the tobacco consumer would have earned if he had enjoyed a perfect health by living a tobacco-free life also comes under it. Global annual costs from tobacco use are 1.4 trillion USD in healthcare expenditure and lost productivity from illness and premature death. (WHO 2017)
It is not like that tobacco doesn't affect your health because you smoke only one or two cigarettes occasionally. It has cumulative effects. Tobacco smoking causes irreversible damage to your body systems and even your genes and DNA. Even your progenies will have to bear the brunt of the cigarettes you smoked today. There is no such thing as the minimum number of cigarettes one has to smoke/minimum packets of tobacco one has to chew before getting cancer. Nobody knows which last cigarette he smoked is responsible for his cancer. No matter what the quantity is, it harms. Whether you take the lethal dose of it all at once or in divided doses, poison is poison.
Let's make a resolution to refrain from all tobacco products rest of our lives and stay away from the hazards of it. Choose life, SAY NO TO TOBACCO, it kills.