Topic On Teenager Smoking Essay Research Paper

Topic On Teenager Smoking Essay, Research Paper

This is a rearch essay done by me, Jacky Cheng. This research essay focus on the topic of teenger smoking.

Teenager Smoking

In this world today, smoking is rising rapidly. Teenagers at a young age start to smoke for a number of reasons. It is too easy today that teenagers will get addicted to cigarettes from the advertisements and wanting to imitate a character you have seen smoking. Cigarettes can be bought easily and teenagers get hooked on them fast. People in the Food and Drug Administration have tried to get kids to stop smoking for years, but the advertisements keep bringing them back and getting new customers all the time especially teenagers.

Smoking originated in the mid-1500s when European explorers arrived in the western

hemisphere and observed how Native Americans smoked the leaves of the tobacco plant in pipes. During World War II, doctors encouraged cigarettes to be sent to soldiers so they could smoke and relieve tension from fighting. But the tragedy back then was that, the technology and medical research were not as advanced as they are today. Therefore the public were not educated about the negative effects of smoking on their health, nor did they know the correlation between smoking diseases such as lung cancer, chronic lung diseases and other critical illness.

Every day in America, about 3,000 young people are becoming regular smokers. (www.nicotinefreeteens.org/Frames/Twars1.html) This is a disturbing news as we realize that youths may have been misguided on the effects of smoking. The reasons behind teenager smoking are money and peer pressure. In modern societies, youths have money to spend on more choices. Many would also try out different things, because of peer pressure. For instance, a person whose friends smoke is much more likely to try smoking, so is a person who has siblings or a parent who smokes. In some cases, this is because the person looks up to his or her family members or friends and wants to be like them. Sometimes young people smoke to fit in with “the crowd,” or they feel pressured into trying smoking. Feeling left out or being teased for refusing to do something are often strong motivators. However, young people may have overlooked that nicotine in tobacco is harmful and smoking is addictive.

Tobacco companies are mainly target teenagers of age13 and above. Each tobacco company needs 4,000 new smokers every day to replace the ones that have died or else the company will go out of business. Cigarette companies often try to portray smoking as sophisticated and glamorous, but the advertisements do not show the lethal effects of smoking. The reason why tobacco advertisements are aimed at youths is because if they smoke, they will become future customers of tobacco companies. These companies figured out that most people tend to smoke the same brand of cigarette throughout their life if they continue to smoke. Most teenagers begin their smoking habit in their high school years because during those times, they will have the opportunity to meet more friends, some of which may have influenced on them badly and encouraged them to start smoking.

Below is a survey between 1991 and 1998 in three high school classes in Canada, about the percentage of smoking.

1991 1994 1998Eight graders 14.3 % 18.4% 19.1%

Tenth graders 20.8% 25.4% 27.6%

Twelfth graders 28.3% 31.2% 35.1%

(”National Survey Results on Drug Use from the Monitoring the Future Study, 1998″, The University of Michigan)

As we can see from the results, the percentage of smokers has increased significantly overall. Even though our education system has improved, kids are still neglecting the bad side of smoking and doing what they want. From the statistic that shown on the above, teenagers today do not really care about their lives, they just want to have as much fun as they can get. They do not seem to have second thoughts of the future, instead, they just do what they want. This is really shocking because even students in the eighth grade are starting acquire the smoking habit which could only ruin their health. Many kids smoke because they are very curious and want to try everything they can. Eventually, kids living in this era are dealing with dangerous things. Many kids do not fully understand the danger of the situation; therefore, they are at risk of all the temptations around them. Ninety percent of all current smokers began their smoking lifestyle as teenagers (Centre for Disease Control (CDC), “Preventing Tobacco Use Among Young People, A Report of the Surgeon General,” 1994). The statistics in a survey table show that teenagers who smoke have a few things in common: The lifestyles of teenage smokers usually not involved in school activities, such as drama clubs or sports teams. Due to the fact that the characteristic of teenage smokers do not like school very much and do not get good grades: one recent study showed that only 7 percent of high school seniors who had an A average smoked, while 46 of those with a D average smoked. (Jaffe, Steven L. P.35) Furthermore, most teenagers surveyed said they would prefer to date nonsmokers.

There is a reality behind the fact that now more teenagers are smoking, however, we are walking on the same paths of our elders. We are starting to go through the things that our eld