I know that this sounds strange, but I have never done any drugs in my life harder than aspirin. I have never smoked and I don't plan to. It's funny that I have to preface this with that and I know this sounds strange because many people do it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not, sadly, their own facts. Cigarette packaging has been used for brand building and sales increase, and that is bad enough, but it has also been used for many decades to sell the crucial lie that cigarettes which are “light”, “mild”, “silver”, and the rest, are somehow “safer”.

This is one of the most important fraud tricks of all time, because people base real world decisions on it, even though low tar cigarettes are just as bad for you as normal cigarettes, as we have known for decades now. Manufacturers’ tricks, like the holes on the filter by your fingers, confuse laboratory-smoking machines, but not people. Smokers who switch to lower tar brands compensate with larger, faster, deeper inhalations, and by smoking more cigarettes. The collected data from a million people shows that those who smoke low tar and “ultra-light” cigarettes get lung cancer at the same rate as people who smoke “normal” cigarettes. They are also, surprisingly, less likely to give up smoking.

Second of all, Smokers are more likely to get cancer than non-smokers. This is particularly true of lung cancer, throat cancer and mouth cancer, which hardly ever affect non-smokers. The more cigarettes you smoke in a day, and the longer you've smoked, the higher your risk of lung cancer. Similarly, the risk rises the deeper you inhale and the earlier in life you started smoking. For ex-smokers, it takes approximately 15 years before the risk of lung cancer drops to the same as that of a non-smoker. If you smoke, the risk of contracting mouth cancer is four times higher than for a non-smoker. Cancer can start in many areas of the mouth, with the most common being on or underneath the tongue, or on the lips.

Third of all, smoking effects society in the ways that it pollutes the air, makes room for new laws such as smoking zones, its a multi million dollar industry so it brings in high taxes which is why we can't make cigarettes illegal although marijuana is much less dangerous and is still forbidden by law, and of course there’s the huge totals of death by smoking related illnesses such as lung cancer and other sorts of health risks. Smoking effects others in the surrounding non-smoking community, because second hand smoke can also contribute to illnesses in people who don't smoke