Should Cigarettes Be Made Illegal Essay

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 8.6 million people suffer from one serious illness or another, all caused by a product sold in local gas stations. The production and sale of cigarettes should be made illegal; it is outrageous that they’re even available. Cigarettes are a hazard to society, causing illness, death, and even in many cases killing children who never had the chance to live in the first place. Cigarettes are detrimental and should be made illegal because of harmful ingredients, the dangers of second hand smoke, and the high risk of illness that they create, which in most cases causes a nearly unbreakable addiction. According to How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease: The Biology and Basis for Smoking-Attributable Disease: A Report of the Surgeon General, the smoke from a cigarette contains harmful gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, carbon monoxide and many more (Guerin 201). This shows just the smoke alone contains a mixture of chemicals that could cause premature death. People should not be put at the risk of inhaling chemicals like carbon monoxide from cigarettes that are sold for anyone over the age …show more content…
The CDC in Health Effects of Second Hand Smoke shows research that 1000 infants a year are killed by the effects of second hand smoke. One may think in an egocentric thought that second hand smoke is only hurting the smoker, while slowly destroying the lung health of people around them. Second hand smoke is the damage that many smokers ignore until it kills a loved one that contracted lung cancer from smoker’s exhale of smoke. The way second hand smoke works is unfair; it allows someone else’s life choices to hurt him. By being exposed to second hand smoke, a non-smoker still inhales around 7000 chemicals from the cigarette, reports the CDC. Cigarettes allow one to hurt not only himself but even non-smokers around