What Smoking Will do for You

First it will cost you a lot of money! Figure out how much one pack costs and then multiply that by seven. That is one week. Right now where I am cigarettes cost $7.50 a pack. That is $ 52.50 only for 1 week! So if you smoke for a year: that is $2730. And that is only 1 pack a day, many people smoke more than that.

What could you buy with $2730. ? Well, you may say, I will just smoke a few now and then, I won't spend more than I can afford. Well, Nick-O-Teen is a tricky guy, once you get a taste for him you find you need more and more, until your whole life can become a round of buy smokes, light them, smoke them, light another one and so on. And when you find you have no money to buy any more— well that is really hard. 

You will call up all your friends and try to bum a smoke. Of course soon that means that all your friends are smokers, because non-smokers do not lend you smokes and do not like you smoking around them. 

So today you bum smokes and tomorrow your friends are knocking on your door or calling you up to get them back or bum some off of you. I have seen people whose whole life is just about where to get that next cigarette! What a sad way to live, but really, it is not a way to live, it is a way to die one puff at a time.

Yet this is only the beginning. It also takes matches or cigarette lighters, ashtrays, and cigarette boxes. You will also find you will often ruin your clothes, rugs or furniture when a but falls off your cigarette and burns a hole.

You can even light yourself on fire that way. Many fires are started by smoking in bed. My father owned two rooming houses, but none of us could ever get him out-of­town overnight. He was afraid to leave, lest someone go to sleep with a cigarette and he lose his houses. Finally, one night that which he had expected occurred: one of the boarders fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. But quick work restricted the damage to only one room.

Perhaps you may think he was worrying too much (he didn't smoke). People with burning cigarettes need to worry more. Fires caused by cigarettes, or from thrown matches used to light them, is responsible for many fires in America. The present writer worked for a time as an assistant fire under­writer. The insurance companies maintain that a third of all U.S. fires are caused by smoking.

You will loose a lot of time. Not only does smoking shorten your life, but think that each time you take out a smoke light it, smoke it and but it time is going that you could use for something better.

About fifteen years ago I stopped by a mechanic's shop to have something spot-welded. With nothing else to do, I stood there as an experienced welder set to work. He wasn't the type to talk much, so I just watched. First, he lit up a cigarette. Either so many minutes had passed and it was time for another one, or he needed it in order to get through the spot welding; which I will never know.

Since he didn't need an arc weld for this one, he broke out the oxyacetylene rig and began to set it up and move it where he wanted it. In order to do this, he needed both hands, so he put the cigarette in his mouth. But doing that was no help since the smoke lazily flummed up into his eyes. He tried to minimize the hot, acrid fumes by squinting his eyes. But that didn't seem to solve the problem, for the smoke was too irritating. Getting nowhere, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and, being right-handed, put it in his best hand -his right one. 

Now he could get the rig ready for the weld. But now he only had one hand to do it with. Yet this seemed to be a way of life he was used to, for he made the best of it and pretty much did most of what was needed with one hand. When the going got tough, he would put the cigarette back in his mouth for several seconds and get to work with both hands. But that could not last long, because his eyes were being smoked again. It was either two hands and a vision problem, or one hand and clear-sightedness. Of course, he could have stopped, to smoke the cigarette through, but that's a poor way to spend the day: standing around smoking cigarettes instead of getting the work done.

So if you start smoking, you will lose your best hand. . or get smoke in your eyes. This may seem like a little thing, but when you live with it day after day. . well, perhaps it's a pretty big thing. You only have so many years; why not make them pleasant?

Smoking will give your teeth an ugly brown-yellow stain and your fingers too. Your mouth will taste rotten in the morning and often other times too. 

Gradually you will get a permanent cough as you poor body tries to throw out the poison. As time goes on it will loose the battle and the little parts that keep your lungs healthy will die and your lungs will fill up with guck. 

Did you know that you will loose the ability to taste your food? Yes, gradually it kills your taste buds. You won't be able to smell as good any more and also you will stink of tobacco so much that non-smokers can smell you from across the room.

Smoking will make your home a dirty place, with ashes and ash-trays and dirty brown stains on the walls and ceilings as well as curtains and pictures.

Girls, did you now that smoking will make you look much older when you are still young? It will ruin your skin and stain your fingers and make you old and ugly. 

It will also effect any baby you ever have when you decide to get married and raise a family. If you smoke when you are pregnant, it can ruin your baby for life. 

Smoking will make you nervous and jittery. It will make you not as alert because it uses up the oxygen your brain needs to run on. You will have less energy and run out of breath quickly if you run. Did you know that no smoker ever wins a long-distance foot race? 

Once you start smoking, you will be stuck with a deadly compulsion that is slowly killing you off. Death or life are in the taking up or laying down of a cigarette. Nicotine is one of the most powerful poisons known to mankind. Just a drop will kill a small animal instantly.  but cigarettes have around 3,000 other nasty chemicals in them as well!

Cigarette smokers die 70 % faster than non-smokers. We have all heard how cigarettes is the main cause of lung cancer, but many other kinds of cancer are caused by smoking as well. You could be one of the people who get throat cancer and have to have their talking box removed, or lip cancer and have a big chunk cut out of your face.

Then there is emphysema, where the lungs get so broken down you have to have an oxygen bottle with you even to walk across the room.

Did you ever run real fast and get 'out of breath'? There you are gasping and struggling to get your breath back. It doesn't feel good, but what if you never got your breath back? What if you spend your last years always gasping and never able to get enough air until you finally die like a fish out of water.

The list is very long of things that smoking can do for you. One thing it will never do. It won't make you 'more grown up' or stronger or prettier or smarter. 

By the way, did you know that it has been scientifically proven that no human being smokes? That's right— the cigarette smokes — the person is just the SUCKER!!

NICK-O-TEEN