Disadvantages of Smoking

張貼日期：Dec 22, 2009 2:18:12 PM

Annie Hsieh

Many people smoke in our society. It might be a behavior of one kind of social intercourse. We can also see that lots of people smoke for refreshing themselves when they feel tired. And some people feel so nervous that they smoke for calming down or relaxing. However, in my opinion, the disadvantages of smoking are more than benefits.

Some disadvantages of smoking are not known well. But they are the problems which need us to solve definitely. One problem is that many people acquire the habit young. More and more teenagers got the smoking habit from friends or elders. So more and more people begin smoking when they are just teenagers. Take, for instance, a younger brother of one of my high school classmates. He started to smoke when he was 15 years old. I once asked him why he wanted to smoke and why he could smoke. He told me he thought that smoking was very cool when he saw his father and brothers smoke. And the father allowed him to smoke. The fact that many youngsters learn smoking from their older family is a very serious problem.

Another disadvantage is about interpersonal relationship. Smoking will produce some special odors for smokers. In general, those odors are rather unpleasant; therefore, they may influence a person’s interpersonal relationship. For example, one of my friends, who is addicted to smoking, always has a stink of cigarettes. Because of the odor, some of his friends, including me, do not like to get along with him. His girlfriend also couldn’t endure the odor and the habit so she decided to break up with him. Sometimes, smokers may think that the odor is nothing; however, in fact, the odor is bad for their relationship.

From the viewpoint of economy, cigarettes are very expensive. And this disadvantage of smoking is better known than others. The price of a pack of cigarettes is the same with a meal. So it might be a big expenditure sometimes. For example, I once counted the money my father spent on cigarettes three years ago. A pack of cigarettes is NT$ 50. And my father gets used to smoking five packs of cigarettes in a week. Therefore, my father spends about NT$ 1000 a month. In total, he spends about NT$ 12000 a year. At that time, I couldn’t say anything when I saw the statistics. Now I still think that smoking is really an expensive habit.

The most serious disadvantage of smoking is it’s harmful to our health. We all know that the smokers get lung cancers or other illnesses more easily than others. But you probably do not know that it may be hard for smokers to recover their health when they catch colds. Take my neighbor, who is a chain smoker, for example. Every time when I see him, he is coughing. Although he doesn’t cough very acutely, he doesn’t seem to be able to stop his coughing easily. My mother says that it is because he smokes too much and his lungs have gotten hurt. So he couldn’t stop coughing after he caught the cold two years ago. I’m shocked about the influence of smoking. It reminds us that smoking is really bad for our health.

Maybe there are some advantages of smoking for smokers. But after looking at those special and authentic examples, I still believe that the disadvantages of smoking are far more than benefits. And I think that there must be lots of people whose thoughts are the same as mine.