Essay on the article Tobacco and Tolerance Blowing smoke о вреде курения

Международный институт экономики и финансов,1 курс,

Высшая Школа Экономики.

on the article “Tobacco and Tolerance: Blowing smoke”.

Not only labour made man differ from a monkey, but also care and attention to his fellow creatures. This is the main point of human relations and the basis of human being. Animals are first of all competitors with each other, and they do not have an instinct to help their neighbours and to think about their safety. The only exception is their own cubs.

Similarly, as a father and mother take care of a small child who does not yet have his own opinion on what is good and what is bad, who do not even know, that many seemingly innocent things harm his health greatly and cause strong addiction. Even when a child realises that, it is very hard for him to make the right decision. And if we consider such thing as smoking, the only right decision is not to start it. One may argue that whether to smoke or not is the private decision of every person and no one might impose his point of view to someone. I agree with this statement, but not always this principle provides us with a solution to the problem of social wellbeing. People make a lot of decisions connected with great risks like motorcycle riding, parachute jumping, smoking, taking drugs and so on. Some of these things have unalterable consequences, which make people regret they have made these decisions during the rest of their lives. The only thing they should ask themselves is whether this thing is worth risking. The fewer would be the number of activities that greatly harm human health, and above all, of these, which are not worth risking like smoking, the better it would be for the health of all humanity. The exceptions are such things as scuba diving or mountain climbing and other, because they can be justified from many reasons and they are not simple and stupid self-poisoning. I do not agree with the author of the article “Tobacco and Tolerance: Blowing smoke” that smoking is not a social problem but a private one and the anti-smoking program should be minimized. Those people, who have already started and have become addicted to ‘the grayish-blue fumes’ can’t fully realize, why do they take this great risk, still acknowledging that this harms their health, and it is hard for them to give up smoking without outside help. For this noble purpose there should always exist those people who can clearly realize this enormous threat as third persons with their unaddicted minds. They should never stop such hard and unappreciated occupations as different anti-smoke programs and, whether smokers want it or not, they should try to pull them out of this ‘gray and poisonous swamp’. This can be done by different government merciless limitations of tobacco producing companies, tobacco advertisements, restricting places for smoking to minimum and so on. That is why smoking is a problem of the whole society, despite some of its members think that it is not, because healthy persons form a healthy society.

Smoking causes (or, if someone would be lucky, it might cause) many different illnesses like lung and mouth cancer, heart disease, oral cavity. In general, the risk of developing a tobacco-related cancer depends on the intensity of the habit as determined by a duration of the smoking habit, a number of cigarettes smoked per day, a tar content of the cigarette, and the depth of inhalation. Cigarette smoking is not only related to the development of lung cancer but also affects the development of cancer of the bladder, oral cavity, and esophagus. A non-smoker’s inhalation of smoke produced by smokers in an enclosed space also appears to heighten the risk of developing lung cancer. That is why the problem of passive smoking is also very actual and to avoid harmful consequences, governments of all countries ought to enlarge the development of a program of making isolated places for smokers to enjoy their dangerous toys without any harm to other people.

After the major medical revelations about smoking during the 1950s and '60s there was an increasing attempt to lessen the influence of tobacco advertising in several countries. Cigarette manufacturers in Canada agreed to end television advertising in 1972 after a bill to effect that end was passed in the Commons. In West Germany television advertising of cigarettes was to be phased out by the end of 1972.And as a result, the rate of smoking in America has declined from more than 40% to about 25% and the number of ex-smokers has trebled. This was the great victory of anti-smoking programs.

In fact, a tobacco-producing industry is very profitable, and of course, these companies try to find or sometimes to invent some evidences and reasons why people need to use their harmful production. I believe that the anti-smoking programs cause great losses to them, and someday they will succeed and it would not be profitable for producers to continue operating any more.

Figure 1 shows that the demand curve for tobacco production is very inelastic, because it is highly addictive and has no close substitutes. Buyers could not reject a considerable amount of it in response to a large increase in price.