Remember...
Though my left hand defeats my right...
Who wins?
Master Chen Hai Yang
It seems that every day is World Something Day. Today is World No Smoking Day. It is an annual worldwide event to promote awareness about the health effects of smoking and to encourage smokers to make a plan to quit. Everywhere around me people are telling me how they've recently given up smoking. My doctor is telling me to seriously think about quitting. My kids are on my case about it, and yet still I don't want to quit. I know I should quit, there's reasons too numerous to list. So why can't I? Why don't I? Why won't I? I go to bed some nights telling myself that I won't have a cigarette in the morning, and I think if I do it often enough, one day it will happen. I'll just stop. One day...
Did you know? Smoking is a major cause of heart disease, stroke, some cancers and other health problems. Tobacco is the second major cause of death in the world. It is currently responsible for the death of one in ten adults worldwide (about 5 million deaths each year). If current smoking patterns continue, it will cause some 10 million deaths each year by 2020. Half the people that smoke today -that is about 650 million people- will eventually be killed by tobacco.More than 19,000 people die each year in Australia from smoking-related illnesses.
These are scary statistics that should be enough for smokers to want to stop. But what about the Governments raking in the profits from tobacco sales. Perhaps they see the tobacco figures as a way to cull over-crowded populations. It's hard to comprehend the logic, or rather, the illogic of it all.
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