·       Cigarettes are highly addictive:

Studies have shown that tobacco can be harder to quit than heroin or cocaine.

·       Cigarettes cause strokes:

Tobacco smoke can cause the arteries in your brain to clog. This can block the blood vessels and cause a stroke. A stroke can cause disability and death.

·       Cigarettes cause lung cancer:

Every cigarette you smoke increases your chance of getting lung cancer.

·       Tobacco use can make you impotent:

Cigarettes may cause sexual impotence due to decreased blood flow to the penis. This can prevent you from having an erection.

·       Cigarettes leave you breathless:

Tobacco use causes crippling, often fatal lung diseases such as emphysema.

Health Canada

·       Italian scientists have shown that nicotine and other addictive drugs affect the brain in related ways.

·       The drug controls smokers, smokers don’t control the drug:

o      Smokers are not able to stop using it when they decide to.

o      Smokers never stop smoking even though evidence shows that it is harmful.

·       Hughes (president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco), says “there’s no doubt that nicotine produces addiction.”  He also states, “if you put people in a position where its hard to get cigarettes, they will go to great lengths to get it!” “In world war II, there are records of starving people trading food for cigarettes in concentration camps.”

·        Tobacco companies insisted that addictive drugs all produce intoxication. Hughes says, “Intoxication is not the centre of the problem. Dependence, the inability to stop, is at the core.”