In most cases, between staring smoking and the moment when the smoker decides for the first time something is wrong, 10 to 20 years pass. Once the moment of “the first cigarette” has passed, that person will not smoke more than 1 to 5 cigarettes a day for a couple of months. But in time, smoking will become part of everyday activities, it will intensify from one month to the other until it becomes a habit.
Smoking is indeed a habit. A habit means something that is done frequently, for a long time, until it becomes automatism.
Calling smoking a habit does not make it less dangerous, because, for example, washing our face in the morning is also a habit, but it does not to us any harm. If you only browse through the available smoking materials over the internet, you will still understand that someone who smokes for 20 years will live a lot less that a person of the same age who never smoked. In most cases, they will become ill in the last half of their lives with severe respiratory diseases, cardio-vascular diseases or will develop a high risk of lung cancer or pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately, once these diseases installed, quitting can not be done so easily.
With smoking, to facts on smoking is much harder than starting. According to the majority’s opinion, the main reason is the dependency that installs itself rapidly, even in 6 months, especially if you start as a teenager. Out of all components of a cigarette, the nicotine is the only one that can cause dependency. Nicotine dependency has a few symptoms: a general tiredness if you don’t smoke, the increasing need of cigarettes, the repetitive quitting tries followed by failure. Because nicotine can boost our mood and improve our intellectual performances, we tend to not want to let it go.
It shouldn’t matter how much nicotine can pleasure or help us at a certain moment, because it is a drug after all, a drug that damages undeniably our health. Nicotine dependency is compared to the dependency caused by drugs as heroine, so it can not be left aside. We should stop smoking because cigarettes also contain substances very similar to those used in German gassing chambers, and we still continue to smoke.