The Dollars and Cents of Smoking
What can smoking cost in a single year? It is estimated that heavy smokers can spend around five thousand dollars on their habit in a single year. That is enough for a fantastic vacation for a couple or even a small family. The thing is; a smoker is going to lose from five to fifteen years off of their life because of their habit. This means that they are wasting important time and money simply to feed their brain with a single unnecessary chemical.
Of course, it isn’t just the cost of an average pack of “smokes” that contribute to the remarkable statistics around the dollars and cents of smoking. Consider the costs to the environment, the lost wages, the health care, and the impact on the health of those who become ill thanks to secondhand smoke. Smoking also leads to things like high cholesterol and low calcium, so it isn’t just cancer that people seek medical care to address, and this adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars around the globe too.
Let’s just start with a few current facts – the first being that an average year sees around five hundred billion dollars spent in direct medical expenses around the world for smoking related illnesses. In the United States the figure is one hundred billion dollars for health care costs associated strictly with smoking, and five billion of it directed at those who have become ill due to secondhand smoke.
The next current fact is that five million of today’s current teenagers will die early because of the smoking habit that they have developed within the past year. These teens are frequent targets of tobacco company advertising, and there are only a few corporations in the United States, Great Britain and Japan that control these campaigns.
They are so successful at their work that they manage to hook around one hundred thousand underage smokers each year. They will show kids that smoking is not only socially appealing, but that it improves athletic performance or makes someone more sophisticated. Statistics indicate that half of the young people convinced by the ads will continue to smoke until they reach their forties, and that a quarter of them will die due to their habit.
Finally, it is vitally important to look at the total cost of smoking, and this means understanding that of the fifteen billion cigarettes sold each day less than half make it into a garbage can. The remains of these cigarettes take around twenty-five years to fully degrade and they leach toxins into the soil as they do so. This means that decades of poison will still exist from all of the cigarettes smoked just today alone.
