Why Quit Smoking?

While we are all waiting for Christmas to arrive, let me rant on for a few minutes. I’ve been reading a book called Number Freaking. It’s a book of statistics about things you would never normally think about. It allows you to discover how far you might have walked in your lifetime, how many people have lived since the beginning of time, and how to cure the world debt. I’m going to use some of the information gleaned from that book to convince anyone in their right mind to never smoke.

I began smoking cigarettes at age 14. I never bought cigarettes, but I stole most of them from my parents who were both fairly heavy smokers. I did it to look cool because it was the thing to do in high school at that time. I continued smoking more than two packs a day from the time I attended college until 1983. That was the last time I ever held a cigarette which makes me a former smoker who hasn’t smoked for 38 years. As always, I seem to be arriving late to the game, but good sense finally prevailed. Here are a few facts you might find interesting or maybe not, but here goes anyway.

The average smoker in America smokes 13 cigarettes a day. One of the maxims of the anti-smoking lobby is that every cigarette smoked knocks 11 min. off your life. Based on this truism, about one year will be lost for every 10 years that the average smoker smokes.

95% of smokers start at or near the age of 16. The average life expectancy at birth in the United States is approximately 78 years, i.e., 62 years after the age of 16. We’ll assume the life lost due to smoking is deducted from these 62 years. Here are three questions to make things a little clearer.

• Question: How much life does an average American smoker lose per year of smoking. Answer: 36 days, six hours, 30 min., and 45 seconds

• Question: At what age, approximately, will average American smokers who start smoking at age 16 reach the age that the habit is predicted to kill them? Answer: 71 years and six months.

• Question: At what age, approximately, will 40-a-day American smoker, starting at age 16, reach the age that the habit is predicted to kill them? Answer: 62 years and nine months.

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By this calculation even one cigarette a day would cost you nearly 6 months of your life.

If the nicotine in 200 cigarettes were to be taken as a single dose, you would die.

IF YOU’RE A SMOKER, DO THE MATH

OH YEAH, 6 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT