-------------------------------------------------
Cigarette Smoking is Worthless: A Persuasive Essay
Cigarette Smoking is Worthless: A Persuasive Essay
Misty Filippelli
Persuasion and Argumentation
Professor Lawler
April 5, 2010
Cigarette Smoking is Worthless: An Introduction
Tobacco was widely cultivated in the pre-colonial American continent and had people used it in various ways either by chewing, drinking as a tea, or inhaling as a powder. It was smoking the dried leaves of tobacco that became a practice of early priests as they used it to diagnose and heal the sick and fend off evil spirits. As years went by, smoking tobacco became more than just a ritualistic practice. The recreational use of tobacco became part of the elite culture and soon, it has become a prevalent habit throughout the globe and its production is now considered a multibillion-dollar industry (Gilman & Zhou, 2004). However, the habit has now been attributed to the growing numbers of diseases, birth defects, and deaths. In United States, smoking accounts for 434,000 deaths per year (EPA, 1993). 14,000 people worldwide meanwhile die every day because of smoking-related diseases (Tuscaloosa, 2010). Moreover, smokers aren’t the only ones in grave danger. It has been said that bystanders within the presence of a smoker are in danger of accumulating the health-related effect brought about by the emitted chemicals from a cigar. In fact, 33 percent of the nonsmoker population in the United States is exposed with environmental tobacco smoke coming from smokers (Movahed and Milne, 2006). Moreover, the effects caused by smoking cigarettes don’t stop from the dangers it brings to people. Smoking also affects the surrounding environment – the air, water, and the land.
Because of the abovementioned facts, smoking became a widely disputed concern with suggestions to delimit the advertising of tobacco products and to ban smoking in public places thereby creating a conflict with the...