While I was leaving campus today, I noticed an insane amount of smokers milling around. That threw me off a little- I wasn't used to seeing so many kids around my age smoking so nonchalantly. When I saw an ad earlier last week in the cafeteria for a program to quit smoking, I thought, "Who are they targeting? No one here smokes."
Well, I thought wrong. Apparently, a decent group of students smokes on a regular basis. And the spot I passed today, that's their unofficial smoking area. These kids are 18 to 22 years old. These are not 30 year olds and older who didn't know the risks of smoking when they got addicted. These are kids, or adults now, that know of the risks associated with smoking. We have health classes to warn us of such things- even if you skipped class or zoned out in class, I'm sure you caught something from high school to warn against cigarettes. The cigarette containers themselves have a warning label on them, telling smokers of the possible dangers.
I don't understand why people who know of the risks of smoking are still doing so. It doesn't make you look cool. I'm sure having blackened lungs and yellowed teeth doesn't make you look cool- or maybe I'm just missing something. It still boggles me that people smoke, drink, and do drugs when the dangers of them are so well known and told. Completely blows my mind.
"These are not 30 year olds and older who didn't know the risks of smoking when they got addicted." - What if these 18-year-olds got addicted when they were younger and didn't know the risks?
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that many smokers do it because their parents did, or their friends do. Just because there are well-known dangers doesn't mean it's going to stop people - we all know that fried food, caffeine, and lack of exercise are going to kill us all - and that does little to motivate us to give up old habits.
Think about it- if they're 18 years old, as we are, wouldn't they know the dangers of smoking? As far back as I remember, smoking was a bad thing to do.
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying that people do it only to spite the risks of it or something, but peer pressure and family does have something to do with it. Sure, they may be addicted and feel cool or whatever, but that doesn't mean that they don't know the risks.