Banning Cigarette Smoking

Banning Cigarette Smoking

Banning cigarette smoking is a major debate among today's society because of the affects that it has on the people that smoke, unborn and early childhood, the people that are around the smoking, and Pollution. Cigarette smoking should be banned for the harm it does to people and the impact it has on the planet not.

Being a smoker can increase your chances of disease and cancer. The Center of Disease, Control, and Prevention says the health effects of cigarette smoking cause somewhere around 443,000 deaths or for one of every five deaths each year in the US. The human body is affected in almost every area when smoking occurs. Cigarettes contain nicotine which is a highly addictive drug just like cocaine, heroin, or marijuana.

Woolston (2009) explains that when pregnant women smoke they increase the risk of stillbirth, premature delivery, and low birth weight. Learning disorders, behavioral problems and a lower IQ can be some consequences that a child might develop when a mother is smoking while pregnant. Birth weight and overall size of a baby is affected by a mother that smokes. Children whose mothers smoked may also have breathing problems like asthma and have an increased chance of SIDS.

Innocent People who don't smoke but are around people that do smoke can still breathe in nicotine and the other chemicals. The Surgeon General reported that children and adults that were exposed to secondhand smoke were at risk for disease and death because of the cancer causing chemicals found in secondhand smoke. The report also said that secondhand smoke actually has higher concentrations of the cancer infecting chemicals than the smoke inhaled when smoking a cigarette.

Smoking impacts the environment we live in as well as animals that live around us. Some Italian researchers found that cigarettes put out 10 times more pollution than a diesel car (Vince 2004). Ucanquit2.org explains how even though a cigarette has been smoked and all that's left is the cigarette butt, it is still toxic and not biodegradable. Somewhere around 1.7 billion pounds of cigarette butts are said to gather up in bodies of water and beaches all over the world ever year, which affects the fish and animals demand for water.

Another reason for banning cigarettes would be the cleanup costs. California Against Waste says that cigarette litter cleanup cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Sometimes when people throughout their cigarettes they are still lit and cause fires, which can cost billions of dollars of damage and also harm people and wildlife

Some states are discussing plans for a ban like in September of 2010 The Telegraph reported that the city officials in New York announced that a new legislation would outlaw smoking in places such as parks, marinas, beaches, pedestrian plazas and even boardwalks throughout the city. Central Park and the Coney