Bet you didn’t know…

Cigarette smoke contains 4,000 chemicals, many of them poisonous. They include:

• Tar – This is the stuff that turns your pearly white teeth a dingy yellow. Think of what this sticky brown stuff makes your lungs look like.
• Cyanide – Yeah, the same stuff exterminators use to kill rats.
• Benzene – Found in the gasoline you put in your car.
• Formaldehyde – Funeral homes use it to preserve the dead.
• Acetone – The main ingredient that peels away nail polish so easily in remover.
• Ammonia – That strong odor that comes from soiled baby diapers. Also used in fertilizer.
• Nicotine – The reason you become addicted, of course. Oddly enough, nicotine was used in insecticide as a poison at one time.

Gather five of your smoking friends together. Say goodbye to one of them. Smoking is responsible for 1 in 5 deaths in the U.S. So one of you stands a good chance of not making it to every one of your high school reunions.

Overall, 6.4 million students today will eventually die of a smoking-related disease.

Quit smoking! If you smoke just a pack a day, here’s what you’d save:

In 1 year: $1,368.75 – a nice vacation during Spring Break.
In 5 years: $6,843.75 – a nice down payment on a car or even a house.
In 20 years: $27,375 – pay cash for a pretty decent car of your choice.

This doesn’t factor in inflation or any increases in the cost of cigarettes either. You could conceivably pocket double or triple the amount in 20 years.

Sounds good, doesn’t it. Unfortunately, nicotine is as addictive as heroin.

The numbers don’t lie:

• 3 – The percentage of high school students who think they will still be smoking five years from now.
• 60 – The actual percentage of high school students who will still be smoking 7 to 9 years later.
• 16 to 20 – The number of years the average person who started smoking as a teen took to finally quit smoking.
• 8 – The average number of attempts former smokers made before successfully quitting.

Even though laws make it illegal to advertise cigarettes to youth, the makers of your favorite smokes know you’re easy prey.

Though it costs just 5¢ to make a pack of cigarettes, manufacturers spend almost $10 billion a year discounting products with retailers so you can continue to afford to smoke. They artificially keep prices low because they know that every time the price goes up 10%, they lose 7% of their youthful customers. Since cigarettes are so cheap to make, the tobacco barons spend these billions on “buy one, get one free” promotions, coupons and discounts to keep you hooked.

Tobacco use certainly controls population. 437,000 Americans die each year from smoking. That includes your aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents, and friends. Worldwide, 3,000,000 people die from health issues caused by tobacco.

More people die from smoking than AIDS, alcohol and drug abuse, car and plane crashes, murders, suicides, and fires combined.

90% of all smokers light up for the first time before they turn 18.

Nicotine is far more addictive than heroin, cocaine and alcohol. A hit of nicotine reaches your brain in just seven seconds. That’s twice as fast as heroin injected directly into a vein.

Smoking has lots of wonderful side effects, including the usual ones: lung cancer, emphysema and chronic bronchitis. It can cause cancers of the lip, throat, bladder, pancreas, stomach, kidney and cervix. It can also lead to heart disease and stroke, if the cancer hasn’t already gotten you.

Chewing a plug or leaf or pinching snuff isn’t a lot different than lighting up. Think of it as sticking a cigarette in your mouth and chewing on it. Yum!

Like its rolled counterparts, smokeless tobacco contains almost 3,000 chemicals. Many of these you wouldn’t want to come into contact with your skin, let alone your mouth.

Take your pick of poisons below:

• Nitrosamines – This is the heavy hitter when it comes to cancer-causing agents. In fact, smokeless tobacco has 20,000 to 43,000 times the nitrosamines of other products such as bacon.
• Polonium 210 – This is the radioactive form of the element Polonium.
• Formaldehyde – Same stuff used in cigarettes and dead bodies.
• Cadmium – A metallic element used in batteries.
• Arsenic – A poison that’s often present in insecticides.