Underage Smoking

             What if you were forced to watch someone you love kill themselves, they're hearts beating slower and slower, they're lungs cease to work. If you know someone who smokes then that's exactly what's happening. 3.5 million people are expected to die from causes directly related to tobacco use ("Cigarette Smoke") and nearly all of them had started smoking before their high school graduation. The younger you begin to smoke, the more likely you are to be an adult smoker. Young people who start smoking at an earlier age are more likely to develop long-term nicotine addiction than people who start later.
             So why do teens start smoking? You might ask. Most teens start smoking for two contradictory reasons: They want to be part of a peer group, while rejecting society and its norms. They want to reach out and to rebel at the same time. Teenagers also relish smoking as a sigh of independence, even impudence. The more authority figures tell them not to smoke, the more psychic rewards they get from the habit. (Roberts), but watching popular movies is the No. 1 factor leading nonsmoking teens to light up. A study shows that after viewing about 50 flicks with smoking scenes, you're three times more likely to smoke than if you had never seen those films. Did you know that in the 1980s, tobacco companies actually signed contracts with movie studios and stars like Sylvester Stallone, stating that when their characters smoked on film, they'd get kickbacks? The tobacco industry stopped making these deals in 1989, but lots of movies still feature smoking (Schwartz).
             Young people are chief sources of new consumers for the tobacco industry, which each year, must replace the many consumers who quit smoking and those who die from smoking-related diseases ("Child and Teen..."). One document even revealed that some companies studied adolescent psychology to learn how to make cigarettes more
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Underage Smoking. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 23:00, April 25, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/8422.html