Let go of tobacco

for the sake of your’s and the planet's life

An estimated 2.55 million middle and high schoolers in the United States consume tobacco. Even in India, 30% of the adult population uses some form of tobacco. That is a whopping 267million number of users!!!

Tobacco, obviously, is deadly harmful. So much so, that the WHO describes the growing use of tobacco as ‘The Tobacco epidemic’. This nicotine-based product kills up to half of its users. I don’t think I need to stress how consuming tobacco is equivalent to setting a deathtrap for yourself. But, as long as someone consuming it doesn’t affect me, why should I care, right?

Here is where we are wrong. It does affect non-users. Aside from secondhand smoke, tobacco can be harmful to us non-smokers because of the damage it causes to the environment.

Middle and low-income countries are major producers of tobacco, where farmland and water resources are already on the low, and instead of cultivating food grains, forests are cleared out for growing this deadly plant. Moreover, the industry’s carbon footprint is one-fifth of that of the commercial airline industry; this indicates a strong role of the tobacco industry in global warming. On top of that, tobacco products contain around 7000 toxic chemicals which seep into our environment when not discarded properly.

Governments all over the world focus on campaigns that describe tobacco as a life-threatening addictive substance. And this is exactly what they are doing wrong. If the common man is made aware of tobacco’s role in causing harm to the environment, there would arise a different level of panic among him. Usually, addicts show self-destructive behaviors, yet they still have empathy and kindness in them. Knowing that their eating habit is adding to the destruction of our planet, I would like to imagine that they might reconsider the amount of tobacco consumption. Hence, the government's and media’s focus should be to highlight that tobacco not only causes cancer and lung diseases, but its mere cultivation distorts the soil, adds to the global warming, causes water and land pollution, and also affects non-smokers directly.

I have started a petition for the same issue on change.org. And while I know, starting a petition might not make the government change their ways, if this reaches a larger audience, we can somehow prick the consciousness of smokers and show them the large-scale harm their daily 5-minute rooftop sessions are causing to the rest of the mankind.

Link to petition-https://chng.it/w5rNwQM6