smoking problem

Smoking Problem of UK Teenage

1.0 Introduction

Scientific experiments have already proved that smoking is harmful to health, but smokers around the world are still growing, especially teenagers. The number of smokers is growing rapidly, which is worrying. According to a survey report issued by the WHO’s Imperial Cancer Research Foundation and American Cancer Research Foundation, now there is about 1.1 billion smokers in the world. Every year 3.15 million people are died of smoking, that is, one dies every ten seconds (Kusel et al, 2013, p. 3). When you blow a cloud and seem to enjoy a kind of pleasure, you will consider smoking is harmful to your health or not.

Among above 10 million British teenagers of 16 to 24 years old, there are 3 million cannot live without cigarette each day (Hill et al, 2013, p. 485-491). The UK is one of the countries teenagers are addicted to smoking and drinking. Teenager smoking problem has surpassed their drug problem and becomes a serious block for their sound growth. For this purpose, experts suggest the British Government raise the legal age for teenagers to buy cigarettes from 16 to 18 years old and forbid liquor manufacturers to do advertising and sponsor any sports or music activity.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the reason why British teenagers smoke and the influence caused by that and seek solutions to solve this problem.

2.0 Causes

Teenagers who just enter adolescence feel like adults psychologically, and they are full of curiosity about all kinds of things and want to have a try. Some parents do not pay attention to the impact of their own behaviors on children and make they think only adults can smoke (Coleman & Bauld, 2011, p. 842-844). Therefore, driven by this psychology, teenagers consider smoking as the mark of maturity and begin to imitate adults to smoke. Also, quite a number of teenagers begin to smoke affected by their peers.

Social morality’s influence on everyone is self-evident. Sometimes, to make things go smoothly and contact friendly, smoking and drinking play an inseparable play, which affects teenagers remarkably. Even many students think smoking and drinking make people feel close and improve efficiency. There is a famous saying in Chinese which can be translated into English as “He that lies down with dogs must rise up with fleas”. Some teenagers have a weak will, and they surrender themselves to external pressure and form the habit of smoking when affected by their peers negatively.

Teenagers are at the stage of psychological development and physical development, and their self-awareness demonstrates continuously. The desire to show off increases gradually and they want to attract others by doing something unconventional or unorthodox. Smoking can well satisfy this psychology. Teenagers think that stars are usually very cool when their smoke in TV series. They will follow and imitate blindly. Some girls think smoking boys are handsome. Because of this, many boys begin to smoke.

Teenagers do not have too much social experience and have high expectation of society. Faced with the complex society, it will be inevitable for them to encounter various psychological setbacks and imbalance (Patel & Arunakumari, 2013, p. 488-489). They will finally resort to smoking to obtain transient happiness, which is so-called “different kinds of distress can be eased by smoking”. Teenagers smoke due to different kinds of causes, including their own causes and social causes, family causes and causes of school education. No matter what kind of causes, smoking has an incalculable negative impact on the healthy growth of teenagers.

3.0 Effects

According to the WHO, what is most harmful to human beings is tobacco. Smoking has already been regarded as “public nuisance”. A great number of science experiments and clinical records show that tobacco contains many kinds of harmful substances (Goniewicz & Zielinska-Danch, 2012, p. 879-885). Long-time smoking can stimulate and harm the laryngeal and tracheal mucosa, causing cough, phlegm and finally leading to chronic tracheitis, emphysema and pulmonary heart disease etc.

The smoke of tobacco at least contains three dangerous chemical substances: tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide. Tar is a substance made up by several kinds of substances and it will turn into a kind of certain viscous substance in the lungs. Nicotine is a substance that makes people addictive. It will be absorbed by the lungs and it has an impact on nervous system. Carbon monoxide can reduce erythrocyte’s ability to transfer oxygen to all parts of human body. The chance of getting lung cancer, oral cancer and laryngocarcinoma for people who smoke 15 to 20 cigarettes a day is 14 times higher than non-smokers. The chance of getting esophageal cancer and becoming dead for them is 4 times higher than non-smokers. The chance of getting bladder cancer and heart disease and becoming dead for them is 2 times higher than non-smokers. Smoking is the main reason for chronic bronchitis and emphysema. And chronic pulmonary diseases also increase the chances of pneumonia and heart disease.

Physiologically speaking, teenagers are at the adolescent stage of physical growth and various organs and systems have not become mature. They have poor immunity from the smoke of tobacco. According to researches, teenagers’ addiction to smoking can cause severe degradation of thinking and damage to intelligence and even thought blocking and impaired memory when it is severe (Kmietowicz, 2013, p. 347). The association, memory, thinking, calculation, identification, and intelligence efficacy of smokers is 10% lower than non-smokers. And it is difficult for them to focus.

Seen from an economic point of view, teenagers’ top priority is to study not make money. They depend completely on their parents in terms of economy and do not have the ability to live independently. Once smoking teenagers have “economic crisis”, they will take illegal measures, such as stealing cigarettes and money from family or others, and even robbery and blackmail. All these cause a big harm to society.

4.0 Solutions

The rectification of teen smoking not only relies on teenagers but also the joint effort of the government, society and family. It has to start from too aspects to solve the issue of teen smoking: prohibition by law and conductive education.

Prohibition by law
British law forbids or limits smoking in public places. At the same time, relevant laws have been enacted to restrict teen smoking. Smoking in middle schools and elementary schools is prohibited and tobacco advertising is forbidden on mass media. Society should reinforce anti-tobacco publicity, establish non-smoking areas gradually, lift tobacco tax, and forbid selling cigarettes to teenagers. A good anti-tobacco social environment is the fundamental precondition of prevent and rectification of teen smoking.

The UK has stipulated clearly that, shops cannot sell tobacco to children. But in reality, it never happens for teenagers not to be able to buy tobacco because they are too young (Mercken et al, 2012, p. 459-469). This means laws and regulation have no effects. Besides, quite a few teachers and parents smoke in front of teenagers, which brings hindrance to the execution and supervision of smoking prevention. As the model in teenagers’ heart, teachers and parents must set a good example. As to those teacher and parents who are addicted to smoking, they should try to not to smoke in front of children or students.

Conductive education
Many middle school students smoke to show off and to demonstrate they have the mature image and demeanor that belong to a true man. Therefore, the values related to smoking should be changed to make smoking teenagers think that smoking is harmful to the innocent image of middle school students and that it makes other people feel disgusting and shows the tendency of misbehavior. In this way, they will quit smoking effectively under the guidance of new values.

People around them should support teenagers in abandoning smoking. Parents, teachers and close friends should encourage smokers to turn into non-smokers and show the degree of their trust and expectation of success (Morgan et al, 2011, p. 547-550). This is the intangible driving force and supervisory force during middle school students’ quitting of smoking and is beneficial to prevention of relapse of smoking. The will to quit smoking should be forged to let them know that once they want to abandon smoking, they should make up their mind. They should make smoking on the contrary side of their beloved things like study, kinship and dreams and quit it in all possible ways. Parents, teachers, friends and society should give them full support to make our environment have more clean air and less smoke.

5.0 Evaluation

Around us, there actually are many smoking teenagers who wish to quit smoking. But some factors always keep bothering them, for example, it is hard to give up smoking and they do not know how to give up smoking. It can be seen that popularization of ways of quitting smoking is a very necessary approach. Therefore, the government should strengthen anti-tobacco publicity and smoking-quitting publicity: smoking is harmful to health; it is like committing suicide for teenagers to smoke; only a strong body can realize the achievement in life. Although the percentage of teen smoking is high in the UK, it has already become a world issue.

According to an investigation conduct by the WHO, one fourth of lung cancer patients come from developed countries and 90% of them smoke. Among those who died of bronchitis, 75% smoke, myocardial infarction, 25% (Roupa & Gourgoulianis, 2011, p. 188-193). Smoking is not only harmful to the one who smokes, but also to his children. One scholar surveyed 5200 pregnant women and found that the frequency of their husbands’ smoking was in direct proportion to perinatal mortality and congenital malformation. The congenital malformation rate of babies whose fathers did not smoke was 0.8%. The congenital malformation rate of babies whose fathers smoked 1-10 cigarettes was 1.4%. The congenital malformation rate of babies whose fathers smoked more than 10 cigarettes was 2.1% (Jones et al, 2013, p. 121-123). In addition, whether the pregnant women smoked or not also affected the perinatal mortality and antenatal mortality rate.

6.0 Conclusion

Currently, the smoking problem of British teenagers and various chain effects brought by smoking have already reached a not optimistic situation. As the country’s future main force, the smoking ban on teenagers has no time to delay. This essay analyzes the harms of smoking on juvenile health, the status quo of smoking by teenagers and several factors causing teenagers to smoke. 2 solutions are proposed based upon smoking harms, the British Government and the society should strive to implement and supervise from these two directions and reduce and even eliminate juvenile smoking.

Reference

Coleman, T., & Bauld, L. (2011). Preventing adolescents' uptake of smoking. Thorax, 66(10), 842-844.(http://thorax.bmj.com/content/66/10/842.extract)

Goniewicz, M. L., & Zielinska-Danch, W. (2012). Electronic cigarette use among teenagers and young adults in Poland. Pediatrics, 130(4), 879-885.

Hill, S., Young, D., Briley, A., Carter, J., & Lang, R. (2013). Baby Be Smoke Free: Teenage smoking cessation pilot. British Journal of Midwifery, 21(7), 485-491.

Jones, A. M., Laporte, A., Rice, N., & Zucchelli, E. (2013). Do public smoking bans have an impact on active smoking? Evidence from the uk, Health Economics. 3(1), 121-123

Kusel, J., Timm, B., & Lockhart, I. (2013). The impact of smoking in the home on the health outcomes of non-smoker occupants in the UK. Tobacco induced diseases, 11(1), 3. (http://www.tobaccoinduceddiseases.com/content/11/1/3 )

Kmietowicz, Z. (2013). Teenagers say slim cigarettes are “cool” and “classy”. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 5(1), 347.

Morgan, M., Eustace, J. A., Plant, B. J., & Hourihane, J. B. (2011). Association of cigarette smoking with drug use and risk taking behaviour in Irish teenagers. Addictive behaviors, 36(5), 547-550.

Mercken, L., Moore, L., & Van Lenthe, F. J. (2012). The effectiveness of school-based smoking prevention interventions among low-and high-SES European teenagers. Health education research, 27(3), 459-469.
(http://her.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/3/459.full)
Patel, B., & Arunakumari, M. P. (2013). Effects of smoking on teenage pregnancy outcomes. international journal of obstetrics and gynaecology, 120(1), pp. 488-489.

Roupa, Z., & Gourgoulianis, K. (2011). The influence of advertising messages on the smoking habits of teenagers. Pneumon, 24(1), 188-193. http://www.pneumon.org/assets/files/844/file461_269.pdf