Do a Favour, and Stop Smoking

When I was younger, friends would bemoan the fact that their parent/s smoked. However, they always accepted it, noting that their parents had grown up in a different time. Unfortunately, despite the wide availability of accurate information these days, people continue to smoke. While I cannot understand this decision, I feel it is due at least partly to both a lack of awareness of certain consequences of smoking, and an understanding of those consequences. I hope with this note to go into this a little, considering the negative health, environmental and social effects.

Smoking is immensely harmful to the person who does it. In Australia, it is the largest preventable cause of premature death and disease. Lung cancer, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, heart disease, stroke, and various other cancers are some of the effects of smoking, effects that kill about 15 000 Australians annually. Lower fertility, problems with pregnancy, blindness, and bone degradation are other consequences. Conceivably, smokers could say that they are allowed to do what they want with their own health. However, given that there are countless people dying against their will from unpreventable causes that they had no chance to avoid, this argument strikes me as facile. While smokers may have the ‘right’ to harm their own health, they have a responsibility to not take it for granted, given that so many are not as healthy as they may be. Not all people are lucky enough to have good health, so those who do should show proper care for themselves.

Overriding this rather abstract argument though is the fact that, even if smokers can destroy their own health, they have no right to harm the health of others: exactly what smokers do. Environmental tobacco smoke, which is what non-smokers passively breathe, is a known carcinogen – a cancer-causing agent. Other serious harms arising from the breathing of air polluted by tobacco smoke include bronchitis, pneumonia and other chest illnesses, asthma, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. An Australia report refers to increased: likelihood of suffering from asthmatic symptoms, risk of heart attack, risk of developing lung cancer, and risk of sudden infant death syndrome. Smokers are actively contributing to the ill health of their friends and all those who are so unfortunate as to breathe the air that has been polluted. No person has the right to inflict this sort of harm upon others against their will; no smoker, therefore, has the right to smoke where it can harm others. 

The environmental effects of smoking are also significant. The process of curing tobacco requires wood to be burnt to dry the leaves, which leads to deforestation. Around 60 million trees are felled each year in Brazil for this purpose, in Pakistan, 1.5 million cubic metres of wood are annually consumed. Further, paper is needed to roll and package cigarettes: a cigarette manufacturing machine uses four miles of paper per hour for this. This large scale deforestation damages the land and contributes to increased flooding, decreased food output and can affect the local climate. On a global scale, many scientists believe deforestation is changing the world’s climate and contributing to global warming

The growing of tobacco requires extensive pesticide and herbicide use. Tobacco depletes soil nutrients at a heavy rate, so requires regular inputs of chemical fertilizers. For example, during the three month period from making the seedbed to transplanting the seed in the field, up to 16 applications of pesticide may be recommended. These products directly poison farm workers – many of whom are children – and cause chronic health problems; they also seep into the soil and pollute waterways and ecological systems and poison livestock and food crops.

The volume of rubbish created by smoking, from the butts, packaging and foil, is deplorable. In 1993, all the cigarette butts thrown away in America weighed as much as 30 800 large elephants. In Australia, almost 1 in 3 butts end up as litter, and discarded components account for up to 43% of all litter in South Australia. This litter gets into bodies of water and beaches, killing marine fauna. The butts also contain toxic chemicals, which leach into the water poisoning organisms. The consequences of all this cigarette waste is intimidating, the potential cost of cleaning it all up frightful.

Only in the context of the egregious health and environmental effects of smoking can its true social costs be understood. In 2002, a report estimated the cost of tobacco use in Australia as $21.06 billion. This expense arose mainly from loss of production due to illness and death and health care costs. Other factors are the costs of passive smoking, welfare costs, ambulance services and fire damage. The burden that this is on the public purse effectively detracts from the quality and availability of health care to other people who may be suffering from other diseases not of their own making. Additionally, smoking is an effect of and a contributor to social inequality: “The greatest burden of illness and costs due to tobacco occurs among households in the lowest quintile of social advantage: smoking is most devastating for those who can least afford it” (National Tobacco Strategy 2004-2009). 

Smoking also has a cost outside of the first world, appalling enough that no casual donation to Make Poverty History could make up for it. Two-thirds of the world’s tobacco is produced in developing countries, taking up land that could be used to feed 10-20 million people. This occurs because the first world is more willing to spend money on a luxury like tobacco than those in the third world are able to spend on food. Land is thus used to produce the commodity of tobacco, endangering a reliable food supply. When you consider that 60% of the 8 million preventable deaths of chlidren annually are due to malnutrition, you certainly have to wonder how anyone could spend money on a pack of cigarettes.

There is no such thing as a ‘social smoker’. Smoking is an anti-social action that harms oneself, others, the environment and is an impediment to global equity. Not only is every cigarette doing you damage, smoking it is an act of indifference to the wellbeing of yourself, those around you, the state of the world, and the plight of the third world. Next time, before you buy a pack of cigarettes, consider doing us all a favour.