Smoking’s Heavy Toll

In Money

Would it surprise you if you were told that even if you do not smoke you are paying plenty for smoking anyway? While statistics for the United States are more readily available, the situation is very similar in many countries. Every year, smoking-related diseases cost about $13 billion in health-care expenses nationwide in the USA. About a third of that is spent by the government through Medicare and Medicaid programs. Also, it is estimated that about 584,000 wage earners and their families are being put on the Social Security disability rolls every year for the same reason. These programs, of course, are supported by taxpayers’ money​—you are paying for them.

Congress has recently voted to continue spending $80 million of taxpayers’ money a year in tobacco price supports to keep the tobacco industry active and profitable. Meanwhile, however, absenteeism, sickness and death related to smoking result in an annual loss in earnings of some $25 billion in all industries and businesses. The government’s income from payroll taxes is diminished proportionately.

Above and beyond all of this is the human cost of smoking. Each year, about three hundred thousand persons die on account of diseases attributable to tobacco smoking. The worst thing about it is that most of this is avoidable. “Cigarette smoking is clearly identified as the chief preventable cause of death in our society,” says the surgeon general in a recent report.

So, whether you smoke or not, you pay heavily for it in one way or another.

In Health

“Vibrating cilia” are what the tiny hairs on the mucous membrane of the respiratory tract are called. Their job is to keep the tract clean by transporting foreign bodies and mucus back to the mouth. How effective are they? At a world conference held in Düsseldorf, Germany, reports were presented on various methods of measuring the hairs’ activity. According to the German scientific journal Spectrum der Wissenschaft, the vibrating cilia of a healthy person can transport foreign substances a distance of from 1.5 to 2 centimeters (0.6 to 0.8 in.) a minute. The magazine goes on to say that ‘the efficiency of the vibrating cilia in persons suffering from chronic bronchitis is reduced to a fourth or a fifth of what is normal.’ But there is something else that burdens the busy hairs even more. Explains the scientific journal: ‘A deep breath burdened with tobacco smoke stops their activity for as long as a full 60 minutes!’

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U.S. Surgeon General’s 1982 Report on Smoking Says:

● Smoking will cause 130,000 deaths from cancer alone during the year

● Of these, 85 percent could have been avoided if the victims had not smoked

● Two-packs-a-day smokers are fifteen to twenty times as likely to die of lung cancer as are nonsmokers

● During this decade more women will die of lung cancer than of breast cancer

● Smoking is also a “major cause” of laryngeal, oral and esophageal cancers and is a “contributory factor” to bladder, kidney and pancreatic cancers