Cigarettes are Hazardous to your Health Day 2023
 |
The habit pursued me with interludes of non smoking until well after the Navy when one fine day I gave up all recreational drugs including tobacco and alcohol.
Today is Cigarettes Are Hazardous To Your Health Day.
It is an observance designed to make people aware of the numbers of people still smoking and those hazards to which they subject themselves.
Cigarettes are said to be a drug because of the tars and nicotine they contain. These act as stimulus barriers to many and are a specific physiological poison. In my mind I was primarily concerned with those mannerisms associated with smoking. How I flicked my ashes, how I held the cigarette — other secondary and inconsequential aspects of a deadly habit.
It is my personal belief that "vaping" is an imperfect substitute because though you may escape the tar the nicotine is still there likely in far greater amounts. Also vaping is subject to it's own inherent pathology.
I lost my biological father to the sequela of smoking. Those disease processes culminated in severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema, pneumonia. bronchopleural fistula, and cor pulmonale.
He had about every disease smoking gives you except lung cancer.
It's sad to think that had he been able to shake the habit that he might still be with us.
If you smoke make all efforts to stop. If you don't smoke don't ever start. Save yourself that inevitable grief which grows slowly within the health of the smoker.