|
|
 |
|
50.0%ANMag Issue 24 Personal Maintenance
Thank You for Smoking
By Theo Khoury, Contributing Writer
Beirut, Lebanon − By the time you finish reading this sentence, a current or former smoker will have died.
Thank you for smoking…
In our recent history, tobacco companies have been portrayed as the incarnation of evil that plagues our society, the evildoers that fill our community with a very addictive and effective method of suicide. They are the merchants of death, the people that want us to die.
I would like to dedicate this article to those misrepresented companies, who are simply trying to survive in a business world with, well let us face it, not such a marketable product.
If we look at the facts, these companies are selling a product that is known to be one of the leading causes of death in our world, and they are marketing it to people who have every method of knowing how debilitating it can be. This is a product that can cause coronary heart disease; Atherosclerosis – fatty deposits in the arteries which can lead to strokes, peripheral vascular disease, gangrene, and aneurisms; Buerger's disease; cancers in the lung, mouth, nose and throat, larynx, esophagus, pancreas, bladder, stomach, myeloid leukemia, and kidney; chronic bronchitis, emphysema and other lung diseases; recurrent infections in the airways; damage and loss of efficiency in the lungs; peptic ulcers (ulcers in the stomach and duodenum) – increase both in incidence and the time they take to heal; tobacco amblyopia (defective vision) and other eye diseases such as cataract; and reduced fertility…
Imagine yourself in their situation trying to sell such a product; it seems more like something used in concentration camps to kill people. But these companies are proving that nothing is impossible; they are setting an example for children everywhere: “with enough hard work you can even sell a product that kills people”.
Despite being such a good role model for kids, these companies are in an ever struggling situation; they are facing more banning laws throughout the developed world, and just last year around 5.4 million of their loyal customers died. But do they give up? No, they march with steady steps trying their best to attract more people to their product, and they are definitely succeeding, with more than 4,000 teenagers taking up smoking each day.
It seems unfair when one hears accusations made by the medical society about how tobacco companies want to make people sick and kill them. If anyone would want you to live more and be healthy, well, it is your tobacco company, since that way you can smoke more and bring them more profit. And to show how much they care about their customers, they now offer you different types of cigarettes, from low to high nicotine content, so that you could choose, based on your preferences, how fast you would like to die.
And then we see those warning messages on the side of each pack of cigarettes that warn about how deadly smoking can be. As if we did not know, we should put more useful messages to smokers instead, such as “Seventy-five percent of smokers have made serious attempts to quit in the past and failed” or “Quitting smoking will cause you mood swings, dizziness, fatigue, constipation, trouble sleeping, headaches, anxiety, irritability, tremors, difficulty concentrating, dry mouth, and hunger cravings for tobacco”. Such messages will help smokers by educating them that quitting smoking will make them unhappy and that they will probably fail, so they should not waste valuable time of their life by trying.
This article has been an attempt to enlighten you on how badly misrepresented tobacco companies are and to show you that they are no different than any other business in the world. They offer a product to the market for the people to buy; they do not force you or pressure you to do so; they just count on your sane human judgment instead. After all, isn’t each cigarette worth 5 minutes and 30 seconds of your life?
Thank you for smoking...
By the time you finish reading this article, 32 people will have died due to smoking.