Cigarettes are dried, finely cut leaves of the tobacco plant wrapped in slim, white-paper rolls. Some have added ingredients and may be treated with chemicals. Cigarette smoke has 4,000 chemicals, most of them harmful to people’s health.
Tobacco leaves contain nicotine, an addictive drug that makes it very hard for people to stop smoking. Smoking cigarettes, or inhaling secondhand smoke from them, increases people’s risk for lung and other cancers, lung diseases such as emphysema, and heart attacks and strokes. Pregnant women risk miscarriages or giving birth to babies who are underweight or have deformities.
In the 1500s, explorer Christopher Columbus saw Native peoples in the Americas smoking tobacco in pipes and brought dried tobacco back to Spain with him. Cigarette smoking wasn’t common in Western Europe, though, until British soldiers in the Crimean War (1854-56) picked it up from their Turkish allies. In the U.S., northern soldiers fighting in the Civil War (1861-65) tried hand-rolled cigarettes made from southern tobacco. After the war, they brought the habit north with them and it spread.
China, India, Brazil, and the U.S. are among the world’s biggest tobacco producers. Over a billion people worldwide are
estimated to smoke cigarettes and more than a million likely die from it each year.
In the U.S. and Canada, health warnings are found on cigarette packages, and cigarettes cannot be advertised on television or sold to minors. Smoking bans in public places are now common in many states and provinces.
Many U.S. states have also sued the tobacco industry for covering up evidence that cigarettes cause cancer and not telling the American public the full truth about the risks of smoking. Courts awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to these states to make up for all the money they have had to spend caring for people with smoking-related illnesses. The industry may never recover financially from these lawsuits.
Pre-Reading Warm Up Questions
1.Do you or any members of your family smoke?
2.Do you know how many people around the world die every year from smoking?
3.Which countries are the largest tobacco producers?
4.Is smoking allowed in public buildings in your city?
5.What does it mean to “sue someone”?
6.Explain the meaning of “secondhand smoke”.