Should smoking cigarette be banned?

Smoking can be best define as the act of inhaling smoke from the burning of

tobacco, pipe, cigar or formerly known as cigarette. Cigarette smoking has been a

norm in the world for many centuries ago. Not only adults who smoke, youngsters

nowadays are also exposed to cigarette smoking at their early age. This

phenomenon is not an awkward situation anymore. According to statistics released

by World Health Organisation (WHO) on 2002, about a third of the male adult global

population smokes. In fact about 15 million cigarettes are sold daily or 10 million

every minute. The question that always come to our mind is, should smoking

cigarette be banned?

To start with, UK Cancer Research estimates that 114, 000 people die each year

from smoking related disease. According to this fact, I am completely agreed to ban

cigarette smoking. From my point of view, I think cigarette smoking brings many

sorts of problems to societies as well as to our country. Let me begin with the health

problem. As we all know, smoking causes health illness like pulmonary diseases

such as cough, bronchitis, asthma and carcinoma of lungs. The smoke being inhale

by smoker will cause heart failure if the systems in the lung are blocking the heart to

pump oxygenated blood to cell in the body. Not only that, passive smokers are also

expose to harm as they inhale unfiltered smoke that will cause more illness. Besides

that, if the smoker is a pregnant woman, she also drags her baby to danger. She will

also give birth to a new generation baby with too low weight and premature. A

premature birth will cause the baby to loss on average 6 ounces of weight and its

pulse will be 30% faster than non smoker’s baby. To add with, recently teenagers

are fascinated by the act of smoking and try to imitate it and will soon turn into a

habit. Current phenomena exists show that pupils play truant in school and wasting

their time smoking in public places with their uniform attires. Because an apple a day

keeps the doctor away, before this crisis become worst, early steps must be taken to

curb this problem. We can assume that smoking is like having one foot in the grave.

A stitch in time saves nine. This saying means that it is better to deal with a problem

at an early stage to prevent it from getting worse. The next reason why smoking

cigarettes should be banned is, it is the basic platform before taking drugs. Drugs

cause severe addiction, so does smoking. Even though smoking does not brings

serious addiction like drugs, but is it still dangerous. Cigarette contains nicotine that

is very addictive and very hard but not impossible to quit. Nicotine is a powerful drug

that speeds up the brain and central nervous system. Besides, it triggers and

releases chemical in the brain that boosts up the mind and subsequently makes you

feel calm. Obviously hard core smokers can smoke for about a pack of cigarette per

day. They state that smoking can unwind themselves. But all that glitters is not gold.

Due to that, they start taking drugs which is more addictive. If the smoker did not

smoke for a day, they just cannot stand it. Hence, it is very hard for a smoker to quit

smoking. If druggies would be sent to rehabilitation centre, smokers will be sent to

deaddiction centre to cure their addiction. In conclusion, drugs are the problem that

many countries are facing now. Unlike smoking, drugs bring more problems to

country. However, we cannot take slightly against smoking as it also causes

problems such as smuggling, snatch thief, house breaking and the list goes on and

on.

A further point is that smoking is a waste of money. Have we ever realize that

cigarette smoking has interrupts the inflow and outflow of money in our country? For

instance, statistics show that today smoking costs the National Health Service (NHS)

more than £5 million per year. A group of researchers found in previous research the

cost of smoking to the NHS was between £1.4 billion and £1.7 billion in 1991. Last

but not the least is largest proportion of the money spent on illness by smoking was

£251 million. Referring to Ministry of Health (MOH) in Malaysia, smoking costs MOH

more money to be spent on a year. Even though government levied high tax on

cigarette and can make more income on that, they have to support the treatment for

illness from smoking that spread through the nation rapidly. Yet, they also need to

pay high tax for cigarette being import from foreign countries. Other than that,

diseases and disability related to smoking put giant load to MOH and lowering their

annual budget. As treatments are more expensive, government should consider

banning smoking so that further problems can be avoided. Because the government

is burden by money problem on smoking, it cannot be used to develop rural areas

and achieve zero poverty during the millennium year of 2020. In short, the money is

wasted to this ridiculous problem. When a problem is serious, people often do not

follow the advice given. So, advice is least heeded when most needed.

My final point is cigarette smoking also waste the money of the smoker itself.

Smokes are as blind as a bat. They are unaware with consequences of smoking.

Imagine that a smoker who smokes a pack of cigarette a day that cost him RM5, in a

week, he spent a total of RM35 on cigarettes. If we sum up the cost for a year, he

had waste his money for RM1825 on useless thing. Without cigarettes smoking,

people will have more money to spend on important things. If we think it in depth, if a

smoker undergoes shortage of money, he is willing to do anything to smoke. The

situation is likely to be pictured like a drug addict. That is why lately smokers have

the guts to practice smuggling, house breaking and lots more. Apart from that, if

money is wasted to buy cigarettes, the smoker especially the man, will face problem

in their expenses. As an example, if in a family both of the parents smoke. They

have to buy 2 packs of cigarette per day, 12 packs for a week and 730 packs each

year! The money used is enough to travel abroad. Noticing small changes early

helps you to adapt to a bigger changes that are to come.

Based on the reasons written above, I cannot see any advantages or good things

about smoking to smokers, societies yet the country. We should emulate India as

they had implemented ban on public smoking. I suggest that government should put

a harsh law against cigarettes smoking. Anyhow they should stop importing

cigarettes to this country and sellers also have to stop selling cigarettes. In the

future, there should be upturns to this problem in order to keep healthy environment

and stay healthy all the time. Thus, we have to put our head together to cope with

this problem. Prevention is better than cure. As we had made the bed, we must lie

on it. We must now accept the outcomes of not preventing smoking from the very

beginning. Overall, we did not profit any from smoking. So we must together attempt

to use our right and suggest the government to ban cigarette smoking. I am totally

agreed if cigarette smoking be banned.