After listening to 2 solid weeks of classroom lecture on all the negative side effects that smoking causes in the human body, I felt somewhat concerned that the habit that I have had for 10 years of my life might be a serious problem to my health, even at this young age. We spent a great deal of time discussing the negative side effects of smoking covering heart disease, cancer, and respiratory failure, but there was very little discussion given to how and why we started smoking in the first place and what steps we have to take to quit. I set out to find these answers to these questions and determine the best way to stop smoking forever.“Smoking kills over 400,000 people a year -- more than one in six people in the United States -- making it more lethal than AIDS, automobile accidents, homicides, suicides, drug overdoses, and fires combined.”(1) It’s baffling to me that something so lethal is sold over the counter. Despite this outrageous number of fatalities, over 47 million people or roughly of the American Adult Population smoke more than a pack a day according to the Harvard Medical Journal. A vast majority of these smokers started in their teens and never quit or quit only to restart again in their mid 20’s. This is a prolific trend that continues today where, “Each day, almost 3,000 young people start to smoke.” (1). Several sources have been targeted with blame for this trend, some of which include advertising, psychological factors, social support structure or peer pressure, and the likes. Despite Anti-Smoking campaigns targeting these specific areas, the trend continues. This continuance of status quo is largely because the anti-smoking campaigns of the rescent past have been primarily targeted at groups that are already smoking or will soon be. It is the opinion of Daniel Heller, a doctor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical Center, that,”Anti-smoking advertising c...
