We live in a time when the effects of smoking tobacco are well established. A quick search on the Internet will yield a wealth of information about why tobacco in any form should not be used for smoking. You can read such online articles as “Ten Facts on Smoking Tobacco”, “The Short Term Effects of Tobacco Smoking”, and “Effects of Smoking and Chewing Tobacco”. You will find all sorts of programs to help people quite smoking and tobacco use altogether. There is information on environment tobacco smoke and what it is doing to our world, the alarming rise of teenage tobacco smokers, and the incidence of mouth cancer from smoking tobacco. You can even buy a tobacco smoking detector online as well.

With all this information floating around about the harmful effects of tobacco smoking, you would think that everyone has gotten the message. Apparently that is not the case. For many people, the reality of what smoking tobacco can do only hits home when someone they love succumbs to a disease that was triggered by tobacco use. Worse still, they do not wake up until they are found to have cancer or some other potentially terminal condition as a result of the smoking. Some even still question all the data, saying that the stories about what are the effects of smoking tobacco are mainly just myths. This head in the sand approach may allow one to continue to smoke for a time, but at some point they will be impacted negatively by either their smoking or the smoking of a loved one.

Some say that smoking pipe tobacco is not as bad as smoking cigarettes. While here may be some minor differences in kind, the fact is that tobacco in any form is still tobacco. Whether chewed, in a pipe or in a cigar or cigarette, it is all the same. And ultimately, the act of smoking tobacco will lead down the same road.

Perhaps more people need to be confronted with a close look at tobacco smokers lungs, so they can see the ravages that tobacco makes over time. Pictures may not have as strong an impact, so invite smokers to come and view a cadaver of a person who has passed away after smoking for a lifetime and dying from lung cancer. Allow them to spend time with people who have lost a lung or who have permanently damaged their hearts due to smoking, and let them learn how life has become much smaller for these people. Let them see how tobacco smoke has ruined marriages, closed doors on career opportunities, and sapped away the life from many a person. Perhaps then all of us will get the message and find more productive things to do than smoking tobacco.