You Will Quit

Smoking Is Not Something New

Smoking is not a new trend. In fact, it has been around for several centuries and its origin can be traced back to the early inhabitants of North America. The settlers were introduced to tobacco products and smoking became socially acceptable for hundreds of years.

Once the settlers were introduced to tobacco and smoking, they sent shiploads of tobacco leaves back to the old world where it became a very desirable commodity. One thing led to another and tobacco became one of the leading exports from North America.

Everyone today has grown up surrounded by people who were smoking. In the 1930-60, it was extremely common for everyone, regardless of their gender to smoke cigarettes. Women considered smoking as one of the ways where they able to show their individuality and independence while men considered it masculine to smoke. Even the old movies that we watch today on Turner Classic Movie Channel or the American Movie Channel show movies where all of the major stars were smoking. And, today as in the past, people emulate their favorite celebrities-if they smoked cigarettes, you probably also did it.

Of course, everyone was smoking and you did not want to be different from everyone else. You just felt that you fit in better with everyone in your crowd if you were doing the same things they were. This might be considered an inadvertent type of peer pressure or even a social nicety that everyone did. There were no serious side effects known and, in fact, many people claimed that smoking helped them avoid gaining weight or that it even helped them relax.

The side effects of smoking would not be known for many years. No one every thought about the consequences of smoking on their health because there was no direct link between their habit and diseases. When medical professionals first started to sound an alarm that cigarette smoking might be bad for you, people scoffed at them. Many people had already been smoking for 40 or more years and there was nothing wrong with them-they were very healthy.

Then it started to become more obvious that cigarette smoking might cause lung cancer. Still there were many skeptics around that did not agree with this. It was not until John Wayne was diagnosed with lung cancer that a lot of people sat up and started to listen to the medical community and their warnings about smoking cigarettes.

Today, after years of extensive research, we now know just how harmful smoking can be to a person. And, to make matters worse, the second hand smoke can be more detrimental to other people. So you are not just hurting yourself, you are hurting your family and friends.