Essay On Secondhand Smoking Should Be Banned

From 1964 to the current day, approximately 2.5 million people in the United States have died due to health problems caused by secondhand smoke, and millions more have had their lives hindered by it. While exposure to secondhand smoke has decreased each year, this rate is too slow to prevent thousands of more deaths from being added to this number, or to keep thousands of more people from suffering due to it. The suffering doesn’t end with humans; animals are being harmed from cigarettes in parks and beaches. In order to significantly lower the annual numbers of secondhand smoke caused deaths and debilitations, as well as spare animals from harm, public use of smoke-producing and other waste-producing tobacco must be banned in the United States.
Those that are most exposed to and most susceptible to negative health effects from secondhand smoke are children and infants: those who cannot protect themselves from smoke. According to the …show more content…
Littered cigarette butts eventually find their way into waterways like storm drains and rivers, then into the ocean and lastly the stomachs of fish and whales, capable of poisoning and sometimes killing them. In fact, a study by the UN International Maritime Organization reported that 111 species of shorebirds and 177 species of marine life experience malnutrition, starvation, and death due to consumption of tobacco-based litter like cigarette butts. Much more so than humans, animals are incapable of escaping the effects of cigarette and tobacco waste so long as smoking is permitted in public, and by extension, the littering of cigarette butts is committed. Animals are huge victims of the actions of mankind, but we can take positive actions to counteract the damage. Making the use of cigarettes and other waste producing tobacco products publically illegal in the United States would drastically improve the well-being of hundreds of species of