When Did We Know About The Effects Of Cigarette Smoking

It seems a day doesn't go by that we don't hear or see something about cigarette smoking and the tobacco companies being blamed for the destructive effects of cigarette smoking on our health, is it a bad rap put on the tobacco companies, or a way for the states to collect more taxes. If you haven't heard the states our increasing the tax on cigarettes, on January 1st Texas increased the tax by a $1.00 a pack to $1.41, New Jersey levies a nation-high $2.58 state tax per pack.

Bangor Maine bans smoking in cars carrying children which went in to effect on Jan.19, it allows the police to stop cars if an adult is smoking while a child under 18 is a passenger. The smoker can be fined $50. Most large companies now have smoke free workplace policies.

So when did we become aware that cigarette smoking was bad for us? It would seem to be on January 11, 1964, when Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a landmark concluding, for the first time, that smoking is a direct cause of lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema. In 1964, 50-percent of adult males and 46-percent of all Americans smoked cigarettes.

Then on May 27, 2004 the U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona released a new comprehensive report on smoking and health, revealing for the first time that smoking causes diseases in nearly every organ of the body. Published 40 years after the surgeon general's first report on smoking, which concluded that smoking was a definite cause of three serious diseases, this newest report finds that cigarette smoking is conclusively linked to diseases such as leukemia, cataracts, pneumonia and cancers of the cervix,kidney, pancreas and stomach.

"We've known for decades that smoking is bad for your health, but this report shows that it's even worse than we knew," Dr. Carmona said. "The toxins from cigarette smoke go everywhere the blood flows. I'm hoping this new information will help motivate people to quit smoking and convince young people not to start in the first place."

Statistics indicate that more than 12 million Americans have died from smoking since the 1964 report of the surgeon general, and another 25 million Americans alive today will most likely die of a smoking related illness. It would seem that the tobacco companies have killed more of us than all the wars in history.

So it looks like we have know that cigarette smoking is bad for are health a little over 40 years right, well in my research I found the following information dated 1892 Titled The Destructive Effects of Cigarette Smoking.

Cigarettes have been analyzed, and most physicians and chemists were surprised to find how much opium is put into them. A tobacconist himself says that the extent to which drugs are used in cigarettes is appalling. Havana flavoring for this same purpose is sold everywhere by the thousand barrels. This flavoring is made from the tonkabean, which contains a deadly poison. The wrappers, warranted to be rice paper, are sometimes made of common paper, and sometimes of the filthy scrapings of rag pickers bleached white with arsenic. What a thing for human lungs.

The habit burns up good health, good resolutions, good manners, good memories, good faculties, and often honesty and truthfulness as well.

Cases of epilepsy, insanity and death are frequently reported as the result of smoking cigarettes, while such physicians as Dr. Lewis Sayre, Dr. Hammond, and Sir Morell Mackenzie of England, name heart trouble, blindness, cancer and other diseases as occasioned by it.

Leading physicians of America unanimously condemn cigarette smoking as one of the vilest and most destructive evils that ever befell the youth of any country, declaring that its direct tendency is a deterioration of the race.

Look at the pale, wilted complexion of a boy who indulges in excessive cigarette smoking. It takes no physician to diagnose his case, and death will surely mark for his own every boy and young man who will follow up the habit. It is no longer a matter of guess. It is a scientific fact which the microscope in every case verifies.

He also goes on to list the cost of smoking and I was surprised that one cigarette cost between 5 and 10 cents each, that's one to two dollars a pack which was a lot of money then.

If the physicians new in 1892 the destructive effects of cigarette smoking why has it taken over 115 years to inform us that the tobacco companies have been poisoning us and we need to quit smoking, could it be the tobacco companies lobbing efforts, who knows, but now that we are aware and the tobacco companies no were aware, they won't be up to any more tricks to keep us hooked, they even put links on their web sites to stop smoking sites to help us quit smoking.

Guess what if you believe that you under estimate the power of greed, the following is taken from Massachusetts Department of Public Health they are one of only 3 states that require tobacco companies to submit reports and what they found is, that from 1998 to 2004 the amount of nicotine in a cigarette has increased steadily, the study showed that regardless of brand that the amount of nicotine that is actually delivered to the smokers lungs has increased significantly overall, nicotine yields increased ten percent. Marlboro, Newport, and Camel, the three most popular brands with young smokers, all delivered significantly more nicotine, and Kool menthol increased a woping twenty percent.

Nicotine in tobacco is a highly addictive drug that affects nearly every organ in our body with the increased levels of nicotine in cigarettes it makes it more difficult to quit smoking. Smoking is a very powerful addiction, and it can take multiple attempts to quit smoking but you must keep trying, you can successfully quit smoking.

Today we have many resources to help us quit smoking, so lets send a message to the tobacco companies and spend that cigarette money on as many stop smoking programs that it takes.

A lot of the quit smoking programs on line offer full money back guarantee so what do you have to lose except a bad habit and the destructive effects of cigarette smoking on our health.