If you thought smoking was safe,then think twice. The lungs are sensitive and addiction is just hard to break when you let yourself go down that line. However if you are facing health problems and you know you are a smoker,then you need to pull the plug on it.Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable cancers. WHO estimated around 1.27 billion tobacco users world-wide. Tobacco consumption alone accounts for nearly 5.4 million deaths per year and one billion people may die in this century if global tobacco consumption remained at the current levels

Smoking involves inhaling and exhaling the fumes of burning plant material. A variety of plant materials are smoked, including marijuana and hashish, but the act is most commonly associated with tobacco as smoked in a cigarette, cigar, or pipe. Tobacco contains nicotine, an alkaloid that is addictive and can have both stimulating and tranquilizing psychoactive effects.

Nicotine is also a particulate residue from combustion and gases such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Although nicotine can be poisonous at very high dosages, its toxic effect as a component of tobacco smoke is generally considered modest compared with that of many other toxins in the smoke. The main health effect of nicotine is its addictiveness. Carbon monoxide has profound, immediate health effects. It passes easily from the lungs into the bloodstream, where it binds to hemoglobin, the molecule in red blood cells that is responsible for the transfer of oxygen in the body. Carbon monoxide displaces oxygen on the hemoglobin molecule and is removed only slowly. Therefore, smokers frequently accumulate high levels of carbon monoxide, which starves the body of oxygen and puts an enormous strain on the entire cardiovascular system.

Nicotine poses several health hazards as follows;
– There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders.
– There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. – It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer.
– It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents. – The sale of nicotine should be under supervision of trained medical personnel.

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