The SMOKER

I hold little or no animosity towards anyone for things they do to themselves. I only feel sorrow for them if they are harming themselves.

If I would hold animosity against them, it is when they tend towards affecting me with what they are doing. I have the right to not be effected by a byproduct of what they choose to do. So, I choose not to be around then when they are doing it...or I choose to not allow then to do it in my spaces.

One of these things is smoking...anything. It bothers me, my eyes, and my sinuses.

Well, with that aside; I may be wrong but it seems to me that the majority of the people I know who are regular smokers have a variety of...moods. These dispositions or frames of mind seem to be in the realm of discontent, anger, or stress. Some could say the anti-smoking sentiment in our society causes these people to feel distress about their habit. I believe that it is the addiction and the effects of the drugs and other chemicals found in the smoke.

The human body is designed to survive and do it in comfort. When it senses a foreign substance, it tries to get rid of it. Because we are intelligent beings, we have a propensity to try to override this function. We take in certain harmful substances that give us pleasure. As a result, these things that we derive physical and psychological pleasure from, become addictive. The cigarette is no exception, especially when it comes to its caustic gases.

The main desired substance in cigarette smoke is referred as a mood-altering drug. People, who have to depend upon this caustic poison, have these mood changes because their whole being is under a constant strain of being up and down. This is due to the repetitive barrage of poisons that their body has to deal with and the constant highs and lows between cigarette breaks. The paradox they find themselves in is a deadly combination of house cleaning and satisfying the unending dependence. Simply put, the body gets rid of the very chemical their psyche needs. This is, sadly, not the only substance found in this gaseous chemical mixture.

The elemental reaction of the burning of any substance creates a seemingly endless array of chemicals including ones with varying degrees of toxicity to the human cell itself, to be specific, the human genome or DNA. These chemicals are commonly refereed to as carcinogens.

The definition of a carcinogen is an element or molecular compound that can and will disrupt the chemical message stored inside a living cell.

A cell contains a multi-dimensional pattern of chemical chains that describe and dictates the function of that cell. There are over 100,000,000,000,000,0… bits of information stored in a human cell. Exactly how many, we don't really know…yet.

With the help of another molecule, a carcinogen penetrates the wall or covering of the cell and distorts or destroys this stored information. The intake of cigarette smoke which contains these chemicals, damages or destroys thousands of cells with every inhalation.

Some damaged cells do survive the chemical barrage only to be killed off by the smoker’s immune system. Occasionally, a cell will be ignored by the immune response and continue to survive. This happens because the part of the cell that says, “I belong here,” remains in tact. This then becomes a cancer cell. If the cloning process is still intact, when it clones its self, it becomes two cells. What makes it a really dangerous cell is if it has lost its ability to control it’s self, i.e., listen to the pancreas, it becomes a deadly cancerous cell.

It can now do one of three things:

1. Grow in a menacing fashion by becoming a malignant carcinogen it self or break apart and grow out of control in various parts of the body;
2. Be a benign cancer cell that just grows by its self; or
3. Remain dormant for years.

The immune response system is very efficient in detecting rogue cells except when the message of these cells is changed in such a way as to render it invisible. It now becomes a deadly Trojan horse that is not recognize until major damage is done and it becomes too late to fix.

Mind you, cancerous cells are a rather rare occurrence, or most smokers would be dead shortly after starting to smoke. What causes so many health problems in smokers is the prolonged exposure to the smoke. As most people have been made aware of is, the chances of cancer increase with time. Besides cancer, most smokers suffer massive cellular destruction which causes so many other health problems.

If we are to look at a smoker’s situation from a holistic prospective, we can say that the entire being (mind, body and spirit) is indeed in a paradoxical battle…the addiction verses the system trying to rid the toxin. It’s simply a game of being constantly exposed to harmful carcinogenic chemicals, aging, and chance occurrence.

Statistically, smoking does increase the likelihood for a large number of problems that keeps one who “Smokes” from knowing and enjoying a good quality of life.

Elizabeth 1997