One out of five Americans, or 2.1 million people, died in 1995 due to tobacco based on data from the American Cancer Society's Cancer Prevention Study II. I don't want to bore you with facts and figures so I will give you just a few statistics that pertains to high school students. For the eighty percent of adults who ever smoked, cigarette smoking was initiated by age 18, and more than half were already smoking regularly by that age. Smoking prevalence was highest among men who have dropped out of high school. The 1995 Youth Risk Behavior Survey data showed that, seventy-one percent of high school students have tried cigarette smoking. That means if you look around more than seven out of ten of the people in this audience have already tried the drug nicotine. One out of every three of you has smoked a cigarette in the past thirty days; this gives some idea of why your township thought it was necessary to bring a speaker in today.
The most common misconception and one I am going to focus most on is when cigarette smokers say, "why do other people care what I do, I am not bothering them." This typical statement could not be more farce. As a nonsmoker I am telling you it does bother me. It bothers me a hell of a lot. Besides the fact that I don't want to see people paying hard-earned money to kill themselves, it is a nuisance in every aspect of the word. A reason it is a nuisance has a lot to do with the mentality of the smoker. Most cigarette smokers think getting addicted is an unfortunate syndrome that just happened to effect them and people should accommodate to their needs. Cigarette smoking is a nuisance to the nonsmoker in many ways in which some smokers do not pay attention to. Nonsmokers who hang out with smokers always perform favors without any reciprocation. For example, my same best friend smokes a pack a day. Every twenty minutes or so she asks me if I want to go outside for a cigarette break.
