Lighting up your way to DEATH | Teen Ink

Lighting up your way to DEATH

March 31, 2009
By Yucarly14 BRONZE, Somerset, New Jersey
Yucarly14 BRONZE, Somerset, New Jersey
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Picture yourself in the hospital dying slowly on the bed because you have been smoking for years and your lungs are as hard as a rock and black as puma and your heart is beating slower and slower by the second. This is what will happen to you if you smoke.

Almost everyone knows that smoking causes cancer, emphysema, and heart disease that can shorten your life 10 years or more, and that habit can cause a smoker thousands of dollars a year. Then how come people are still lighting up? The word is ADDICTION.

Smoking is a hard habit to break because of the nicotine in the tobacco. A lot of teens smoke because their family or friends do or because they think it’s cool. Well it’s not. Smoking develops yellow nails, yellow teeth, wrinkles, bad breath, bad smelling hair and clothes, and black unhealthy lungs. Lastly the oh so terrible DEATH. If you don’t want to die anytime soon then don’t smoke.

One result of smoking cigarettes is a heart attack. Smoking clogs the arteries then the blood doesn’t flow to the heart and the person suffers a heart attack. What is inhaled from smoke goes directly into your lungs. Our blood has a path it takes, into the heart, through the lungs, back to the other side of the heart, out to the body. So the blood gets the chemicals smoking leaves behind and takes them to your heart. If you love your heart, don’t smoke. I have an aunt who had about 5 heart attacks at the same time and the doctor said if she keeps on smoking she is going to die within 6 to 9 months. She is still smoking.

People who smoke risk their lives every time they light up. When they die, the people in their family suffer, especially the kids. I have an uncle who smokes and has a baby girl who is about 7 months old and if he keeps lighting up I don’t think he will see her grow up or his other kids. I remember one day that I was sleeping over at my uncle’s hose over summer vacation and it was about 11 or 12 at night and he wanted to smoke but it was really dark outside so then he went to the kitchen where there was a fan and he started to smoke in front of the fan. I thought that was the dumbest thing ever. He could have just gone outside like always. There are many different ways a person can die because of smoking cigarettes. Other than heart attacks. There is emphysema. Emphysema is an illness that slowly rots you lungs. People with emphysema often get bronchitis again and again, and suffer lung and heart failure. Smoking also causes cancer.

Another reason why people should not smoke is that they can get addicted to the nicotine inside cigarettes. I have a friend that I saw a couple of days ago smoking and she is only 13. My friend and I tried to stop her from smoking but she didn’t want to. My friend was there laughing like if it was nothing I was like, “… stop because if you keep on going like this your BEEP is going to die!” She said she knows and that’s why she’s doing it. I felt so sorry for her because I know her for a long time and I never imagined her doing what she’s doing right now. Nicotine in cigarettes is addictive because when you smoke, nicotine reaches the brain in about 10 to 20 seconds. This causes a chemical called dopamine to be released in the brain.

People who smoke are killing themselves, and their kids. Billions of people are dying of smokes because they think it’s cool. But it’s not. I strongly believe people should not smoke because they are damaging their heart and lungs and with their second hand smoke they are killing other people around them. Other people are dying faster because of deadly things called cigarettes. Don’t smoke even though you think it’s cool because you know everyone in the world is going to die especially you. Just don’t smoke at all.


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