Is there sense behind smoking?

Have you ever seen these kids walking around campus smoking a cigarette? One has to really wonder what is travelling through their mind while they puff away on their cigarette. Do they enjoy seeing their life puffed away as every little puff of smoke shortens their life?

According to the British Medicine Journal, every cigarette decreases your life by eleven minutes, which seems like an awfully expensive price to have to pay. Of the three deadly habits in smoking, drinking, and drug abuse, they decide to choose the one habit that makes the least sense? Alcohol and drugs have possible health side effects but also produce a “buzz” or “high” in their respective roles, while smoking cigarettes has the most severe health related side effects while producing neither a “high” nor a “buzz.”

It just blows my mind watching the smoking commercials on TV trying to sell their product, but required by law to include a message at the bottom, stating something along the lines of “Indulging in our product leads to a variety of potentially life ending diseases, smoke at your own risk.”

Do the students think that this message is a joke? May be these students who continue to smoke cannot read these messages, or just think that they are smarter than the experts in their field of study.

As if smoking cigarettes was not stupid enough by itself, they overcharge you to pay for these disease-inducing products. According to Health.com, the average price of a pack of cigarettes is more than $5, which seems like it would put quite a dent in a college student’s wallet, as most of them do not have jobs for a steady income.

So now we have a college students who are not only killing themselves, but are spending most of their money doing so. Maybe it is because that is what the cool kids do? Wrong. Even those old reasons that inspired our elders to smoke no longer apply. They used to smoke because it was what the cool kids did, and that was how the national media trained them to think.

Now, you find that most of them are trying their hardest to stop smoking, with the growth of all these new products to help them accomplish that goal. I would find it hard pressed to find anyone who views smoking as cool anymore, and in a way society is starting to show this trend. For example, Millersville University only allows smoking in designated areas, they formerly allowed it throughout campus.

With all of these reasons listed, it becomes hard to find any real reason why college students smoke. Are they trying to be rebellious, or are they just plain stupid? Either way I do not know why these kids are allowed into college because there are clearly smarter kids out there.