Cigarette Research Paper

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Jinsu Park Professor Williamson College Writing 2 November 25 2011 Parents and adolescents are not educated enough about the dangers of smoking. Each year over 400,000 people die from smoking cigarettes, including those affected indirectly through second-hand smoke. The effects of cigarette smoking are numerous. Some mild effects include shortness of breath and poor circulation. More serious effects include respiratory diseases such as bronchitis and emphysema, as well as cancers of the lungs, throat, and mouth. There is overwhelming evidence that almost all smokers begin when they are young. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “More than 80% of adult smokers begin smoking before 18 years of age.…show more content…
11). This is another reason to why adolescents should be prevented from smoking cigarettes. Once smoking is initiated, it is very difficult to start. Therefore, if adolescents start smoking at their young age, the amount of money they spend on buying cigarette packs and the amount they pay for health-care will add up to a great amount when they become an adult. Media influence is another factor in adolescent smoking initiation. In a study published in Lancet, researchers concluded “Our results suggest that viewing smoking in movies strongly predicts whether or not adolescents initiate smoking, and the effect increases significantly with greater exposure” (Dalton et al. 284). They concluded that there is a high correlation between exposure to cigarette smoking in movies and smoking initiation. Those who received more exposure were more likely to begin smoking than those who received less. Another interesting finding in this study was that children in non-smoking households were more likely to be effected by exposure to cigarette smoking in movies than those from smoking households. This may be because those from non-smoking homes do not have a realistic perception of smoking, so their mental perceptions of smoking are influenced entirely by the movies. If this is the case, then the media has a very large influence on adolescents, and more should be done to reduce exposure to movies that portray cigarette smoking. One way is for those who
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