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Tobacco smoking is the practice of drawing tobacco smoke into the mouth. In the case of cigarette smoking, it also involves the inhaling of tobacco smoke. Tobacco smoke contains nicotine, which is highly addictive when inhaled. Nicotine is one of thousands of chemicals contained in cigarette smoke. The most widespread form of tobacco smoking is smoking of cigarettes, followed by pipe smoking and cigar smoking.

Lighting a cigarette etc. is done with a lighter or match. One of the most common favors asked from a stranger is for a light; it is also used to get into contact with someone.

History

Tobacco smoking, using both pipes and cigars, was long common to many Native American cultures of the Americas. It is depicted in the art of the Classic era Maya civilization of some 1500 years ago.

With the arrival of the Europeans in the New World late in the 15th century, tobacco smoking was brought to Europe, and from there gradually spread to the rest of the world.

The cigarette was less common than the cigar or the smoking pipe until the early 20th century, when cheap mechanically made cigarettes became common.

Health effects

It has been scientifically established that "tobacco use is the single most important preventable risk to human health in developed countries and an important cause of premature death worldwide."

The most important are lung cancer and other cancers of the respiratory tract. Cancers of the larynx and tongue are also important causes of mortality and morbidity.
There are around 3000 chemicals found in tobacco smoke. Below are chemicals of known or supected carcinogenicity. The classification reflects the fact that there are no direct data on humans :

• Carcinogenic
  • 4-Aminobiphenyl
  • Benzene
  • Cadmium
  • Chromium
  • 2-Naphthylamine
  • Nickel
  • Polonium-210
  • Radon
  • Vinyl chloride
• Probably carcinogenic to humans
  • Acrylonitrile
  • Benzoanthracene
  • Benzopyrene
  • 1,3-Butadiene
  • Dibenz(a,h)anthracene
  • Formaldehyde
  • N-Nitrosodiethylamine
  • N-Nitrosodimethylamine
• Possibly carcinogenic to humans
  • Acetaldehyde
  • Benzofluoranthene
  • Benzofluoranthene
  • Benzofluoranthene
  • Dibenzacridine
  • Dibenzacridine
  • 7H-Dibenzcarbazole
  • Dibenzo(a,i)pyrene
  • Dibenzo(a,I)pyrene
  • 1,1-Dimethylhydrazine
  • Hydrazine
  • Indenopyrene
  • Lead
  • 5-Methylchrysene
  • 4-(Methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK)
  • 2-Nitropropane
  • N-Nitrosodiethanolamine
  • N-Nitrosomethylethylamine
  • N-Nitrosomorpholine
  • N'-Nitrosonornicotine (NNN)
  • N-Nitrosopyrrolidine
  • Quinoline
  • iv ortho-Toluidine
  • Urethane (Ethyl Carbamate)

The length of time that a person continues to smoke as well as the amount smoked increases their chances of contracting lung cancer. However, if someone stops smoking, then these chances steadily decrease as the damage to their lungs is repaired.

Smoking also increases the chance of heart disease. Several ingredients of tobacco lead to the narrowing of blood vessels, increasing the likelihood of a block, and thus a heart attack. Other tobacco chemicals lead to high blood pressure. Also, some chemicals damage the inside of arteries, for example making it possible for cholesterol to adhere to the artery wall, possibly leading to a heart attack.

Diseases linked to tobacco smoking:

• lung cancer and other cancers
• emphysema
• stroke
• peripheral vascular disease
• birth defects
• Buerger's disease
• impotence
• chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic bronchitis in particular

Nicotine is a powerful stimulant and is one of the main factors leading to the addictiveness of tobacco smoking. Although the amount of nicotine inhaled with tobacco smoke is quite small (most of the substance is destroyed by the heat) it is still sufficient to cause addiction. The amount of nicotine absorbed by the body from smoking depends on many factors, including the type of tobacco, whether the smoke is inhaled, and whether a filter is used. On average it takes about seven seconds for the substance to reach the brain.

Many of the health and moral effects can be avoided through Smoking cessation.

Moral effects

Tobacco dulls the mind. It does this not only by wasting the body, the physical basis of the mind, but it does it through habits of intellectual idleness, which the user of tobacco naturally forms. Whoever heard of a first-class loafer who did not e-a-t the weed or burn it, or both? On the rail train recently we were compelled to ride for an hour in the smoking-car. In front of me sat a young man, drawing and puffing away at a cigar, polluting the entire region about him. In the short hour enough time was lost by that young man to have carefully read ten pages of the best standard literature. All this we observed by an occasional glance from the delightful volume in our own hands. The ordinary user of tobacco has little taste for reading, little passion for knowledge, and superficial habits of continued reasoning. His leisure moments are absorbed in the sense-gratification of the weed. But if as much attention had been given in acquiring the habit of reading as had been given in learning the use of tobacco, the most valuable of all habits would take the place of one of the most useless of all habits.

When we see a person trying to read with a cigar or a pipe in his mouth, Knowing that nine-tenths of his real consciousness is given to his smoking, and one-tenth to what he is reading, we are reminded of the commercial traveler who "wanted to make the show of a library at home, so he wrote to a book merchant in London, saying: "Send me six feet of theology, and about as much metaphysics, and near a yard of civil law in old folio." Not a sentimentalist, a reformer, nor a crank, but Dr. James Copeland says: "Tobacco weakens the nervous powers, favors a dreamy, imaginative, and imbecile state of mind, produces indolence and incapacity for manly or continuous exertion, and sinks its votary into a state of careless inactivity and selfish enjoyment of vice." Professor L. H. Gause writes: "The intellect becomes duller and duller, until at last it is painful to make any intellectual effort, and we sink into a sensuous or sensual animal.

Any one who would retain a clear mind, sound lungs, undisturbed heart, or healthy stomach, must not smoke or chew the poisonous plant." It is commonly known that in a number of American and foreign colleges, by actual testing, the non-user of tobacco is superior in mental vigor and scholarship to the user of it. And in the examinations in the naval academy a large percentage of those who fail to pass, fail because of the evil effects of smoking.

Tobacco blunts the moral nature. It is not certain how long tobacco has been used as a narcotic. Some authorities hold that the smoking of tobacco was an ancient custom among the Chinese. But if this is true, we know that it did not spread among the neighboring nations. When Columbus came to America he found the natives of the West Indies and the American Indian smoking the weed. With the Indian its use has always had a religious and legal significance. Early in the sixteenth century tobacco was introduced into England, later into Spain, and still later, in 1560, into Italy. Used for its medicinal properties at first, soon it came to be used as a luxury. The popes of Italy saw its harm and thundered against it.

The priests and sultans of Turkey declared smoking a crime. One sultan made it punishable with death. The pipes of smokers were thrust through their noses in Turkey, and in Russia the noses of smokers were cut off in the earlier part of the seventeenth century. "King James I of England issued a counterblast to tobacco, in which he described its use as a 'custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fumes thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.'" As one contrasts this sentiment with the practice of the present sovereign of England, his breath is almost taken away in his great fall from the sublime to the ridiculous!

While we do not believe a moderate use of tobacco for a mature person is necessarily a sin, yet we do believe that it does blunt the moral sense, and soon leads to spiritual weakness and indifference, which are sins. To love God with all one's heart, mind, soul, and strength, and one's neighbor as himself, means not only a denial of that which is questionable in morals, but a practice of that which is positively good. However noble or worthy in character may be some who use tobacco, yet by common consent it is a "tool of the devil." Every den of gamblers, every low-down grogshop, every smoking-car, every public resort and waiting-room departments for men, every rendezvous of rogues, loafers, villains, and tramps is thoroughly saturated with the vile stench of the cuspidor and the poisonous odors of the pipe and cigar. "Rev. Dr. Cox abandoned tobacco after a drunken loafer asked him for a light." Not until then had he seen and felt the disreputable fraternity that existed between the users of tobacco.

Owen Meredith gives us a standard of strength and freedom, which is an inspiration to every lover of rounded, perfected manhood and womanhood:

Strong is that man, he only strong,

To whose well-ordered will belong,

For service and delight,

All powers that in the face of wrong

Establish right.

And free is he, and only he,

Who, from his tyrant passions free,

By fortune undismayed,

Has power within himself to be,

By self obeyed.

If such a man there be, where'er

Beneath the sun and moon he fare,

He can not fare amiss;

Great nature hath him in her care.

Her cause is his.

Only let the "will," the "powers," the "freedom," and the "self" of which the writer speaks become the "Christ will," the "Christ powers," the "Christ freedom," and the "Christ self." Then the strongest chains of bondage must fly into flinters. For "if the Son make you free, ye are free indeed."

Legal aspects

"Passive smoking" or "secondhand smoke" - also known as "environmental tobacco smoke" (ETS) or "involuntary smoking" - occurs when the smoke from one person's cigarette is inhaled by other people. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1993 issued a report estimating that 3,000 lung-cancer related deaths in the US were caused by passive smoking every year. Lobbyists and researchers supported by the tobacco industry aggressively attacked the EPA study as "junk science," but subsequent research has generally supported its conclusions. In 2002, a group of 29 experts from 12 countries convened by the Monographs Programme of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization reviewed all significant published evidence related to tobacco smoking and cancer. It concluded its evaluation of the carcinogenic risks associated with involuntary smoking, with second-hand smoke also being classified as carcinogenic to humans. An earlier WHO epidemiology study also found "weak evidence of a dose-response relationship between risk of lung cancer and exposure to spousal and workplace ETS." The fact that the evidence was described as "weak" has been interpreted by the tobacco industry and its supporters as evidence that the ETS-lung cancer link has been "disproven." In reality, the "weakness" of the evidence stems from the fact that the risk of ETS for individuals is relatively small, making it difficult to detect through epidemiology. In addition to epidemiology, however, several other types of scientific evidence (including animal experiments, chemical constituent analysis of ETS, and human metabolic studies) support the WHO and EPA conclusions.

Smoking continues to be a major problem because of smokers' addiction to the nicotine in tobacco smoke, and the vigorous marketing of cigarettes by the tobacco industry. Several western countries have put restrictions on cigarette advertising, particularly on advertising that appears to target minors..

In many countries smoking in public buildings is now prohibited. Many office buildings (are required by law to) contain specially ventilated smoking areas.

In the United States and New Zealand, it has long been illegal to sell tobacco products to minors.

See also other forms of tobacco use :

• Chewing tobacco
• Snuff

References:

1. Joint Committee on Smoking and Health. Smoking and health: physician responsibility; a statement of the Joint Committee on Smoking and Health. Chest 1995; 198:201- 208
2. Boffetta,P., Agudo,A., Ahrens,W., Benhamou,E., Benhamou,S., Darby,S.C., Ferro,G., Fortes,C., Gonzalez,C.A., Jockel,K.H., Krauss,M., Kreienbrock,L., Kreuzer,M., Mendes,A., Merletti,F., Nyberg,F., Pershagen,G., Pohlabeln,H., Riboli,E., Schmid,G., Simonato,L., Tredaniel,J., Whitley,E., Wichmann,H.E., Saracci,R. 1998. Multicenter case-control study of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer in Europe. J. Natl. Cancer Inst. 90:1440-1450.