Diseases linked to smoking claim millions of lives each year.

The more science learns, the more tobacco’s deadliness is revealed. Every year over two million smokers die of heart disease, lung cancer, and emphysema. A smoker’s heart works harder than a nonsmoker’s. It averages eight to ten more beats per minute during the day and three to five more during sleep. Research published in the magazine Science stated: “Cigarette smoking is the major single known cause of cancer mortality in the United States, and tobacco’s contribution to all cancer deaths is estimated to be 30 percent.” Most of this 30 percent is from lung cancer. In South Africa a smoker’s 90-cigarette-a-day addiction damaged his optic nerve and left him blind​—a victim of tobacco amblyopia.

Liberated to Enslavement?

The modern woman, now liberated, is smoking more and reaping more of the harvest. Breast cancer used to be the biggest killer of American women​—now it is lung cancer. It has skyrocketed 500 percent since 1950; it killed over 38,000 women last year. Heart disease is also catching up with women. Smoking taxes the heart and the circulatory system, and every year 800,000 women have either heart attacks or strokes. Women with chronic bronchitis who smoke have the dubious distinction of now outnumbering men by one million cases. Chemicals in cigarette smoke cause genetic damage that could initiate cancer in pregnant women and in their fetuses. Modern woman liberated? Liberated to enslavement by tobacco, perhaps, along with her male peers?

To minimize the dangers, some smokers switch from cigarettes to pipe or cigars. Last December the Journal of the American Medical Association sent that dream up in smoke. The tobacco used in pipes and cigars contains more nicotine, more cancerous tars, and produces more dangerous carbon monoxide gas than that used in cigarettes. Surveys show that many, especially teenagers, believe that smokeless tobacco is a safe alternative to cigarettes. Not so. Last year in the United States a 19-year-old man died from oral cancer. Before a congressional subcommittee, his mother said he started using snuff at age 12, but he refused to quit because smokeless tobacco carried no warning label and athletes advertised it.

Whether you chew or suck on moist snuff held between cheek and gum (called dipping), you are asking for oral cancer, gum disease, and nicotine addiction. Cancer develops where the tobacco touches cheek and gum, and the malignancy often spreads to other parts of the body. Smokeless tobacco contains 20 or more cancer-causing nitrosamines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The Worldwatch report said that over the last 20 years the use of chewing tobacco and snuff increased 40 percent, with a corresponding increase in oral cancer.

Victims of Others’ Smoke

Tobacco users endanger not only their own health but also that of others. More than ten studies last year showed that passive smoking​—inhaling the smoke from the cigarettes of others—​caused lung cancer in the nonsmoking spouses of smokers. Research in Japan, West Germany, Greece, and the United States indicates that “spouses of smokers are two or three times more likely to get lung cancer than those of nonsmokers.” One study “estimated that passive smoking in the United States causes more cancer deaths than all regulated industrial air pollutants combined.” Canadian scientists have reported that there is no safe level for secondhand smoke. It contains “over 50 known carcinogens and 3,800 chemical compounds.” One medical journal said: “The more smokers one has lived with, the higher one’s risk of cancer.”

And it is more than the puffing of smoke that pollutes the air of others. Between puffs the unfiltered smoke curls upward from cigarettes held in hands or sitting in ashtrays. This sidestream smoke accounts for 85 percent of the smoke in a room with smokers. It contains such irritants as formaldehyde, ammonia, acrolein, nitrous oxide, hydrocarbons, and particulate matter. It increases the carcinogens inhaled by nearby nonsmokers by 50 times.

Children with parents who smoke have more colds, influenza, bronchitis, asthma, and pneumonia. Learning ability is damaged in children of mothers who smoke. Studies have shown that they read more slowly and in school may lag several months behind the children of nonsmokers. Mothers who smoke give birth to underweight babies twice as often as nonsmoking mothers do. In India, 39 percent of the women chew tobacco. Underweight babies are the result. The Harvard Medical School Health Letter of July last year ended its article on the dangers of passive smoking, titled “The Last Gasp?,” with this statement: “And smoking adults should realize that when they light up in the presence of infants they are engaging in a not-so-mild form of child abuse.” And the abuse of everyone else around them!