Why People Smoke?

Some people are curious as to why other people smoke. Don't they know that smoking causes lung cancer? Why would they suck and blow their lives away? Don't they know they'll get addicted and die? Don't they realize that they're blowing their yucky smoke at other people and exposing them to second hand smoking?

These are common complaints that non smokers have about smokers, and why people smoke remains largely a mystery to them. Even if it's a free country and we have smoking and non smoking sections, smoking still manages to cause controversy, because it brings up so many issues like health, science, media influence, economics, and freedom of choice.

Common reasons cited for why people smoke are the high they get from nicotine, peer pressure from others around them doing it, the glamorizing of smoking on the big screen and television, desire to lose weight and the inability to quit. It's definitely true that these are factors that contribute to the choice to smoke, but this is an oversimplified viewpoint of cause and effect. People are a lot more complicated than that and everyone is different. We can only derive trends of smoking, not causes.

It might seem intuitive that smoking is bad for you, but technically research hasn't shown that smoking causes cancer. This is because it's seen as unethical to perform experiments in which people are asked to smoke and then monitored for the development of cancer. Research has suggested a strong correlation between smoking and cancer but research has often been plagued with real or perceived flaws in design, and so it remains largely inconclusive. Yet the idea that smoking is bad for you remains somewhat common sense, and it's also inconclusive why people smoke in the first place, at least in an official sense.

Critics of smoking might have you believe that just one cigarette will have you addicted for life, but everyone's biological makeup is different and while nicotine is highly addictive, you can't say for sure whether someone will become heavily addicted or not. Still, it seems that many people suffer from addiction and eventually develop cancer as well. Other criticisms are directed at tobacco companies, which are accused by some of profiting off of death and minimizing the dangers of smoking. In any case, smoking is a significant part of our economy and it won't go away anytime soon even if we want it to.

In the end, smoking is a personal choice, and as simple as it seems, that's the reason why people smoke and other people don't, and there will be some who suffer from it and some who don't. It seems the best way to get along is for smokers to keep their smoking confined and for non smokers to avoid smoking areas, which seems like a form of segregation. But segregation inevitably comes with diversity and differences of opinion, the hallmark of American society.