How I Changed My Mind about Smoking

Smoking is the only social issue that I want to focus on today, because either in China or in America, the governments pour tons of effort on persuading people quit smoking. They mark the harmfulness on the packages of cigarettes in order to warn people smoking can cause serious illness. I don`t think it works. Those people, who are addicting to cigarettes don`t really care how much harmfulness will be caused in their body, or if Marlboro is allowed to sponsor sports teams or not. Smokers buy cigarettes because the need physically and mentally. Generally speaking, the most efficient way to make people change their mind about something is, if they have experienced firsthand. Just like how I quitted smoking, I realized that addicted to it made me feeling sick, which was the major motivation that helped me changing my mind about it. Probably, I was not truly addicted to it.

Teenagers are able to buy cigarettes from a store without showing their picture IDs easily in China. We don`t have the age limitation as in America. So that`s why a certain amount of young people start smoking when they are very little. My mom told me not to raise the habit of smoking because she is a medical doctor, and she knows how bad the smoking is. A bunch of my friends are smoking, so they encouraged me to try one or two of the cigarettes as soon as we hanged out together. I knew it was bad, and I will disobey my mom`s warning if I started smoking. But it was just an abstract conception, she didn`t talk me into it, I was curious about the feeling of smoking, though. They look pretty cool when they are holding cigarettes. And I believed I won`t die immediately if I smoked one or two of cigarettes. So I started trying to smoke when I was still a high school student in China.

I smoked secretly for four years actually. I dared not to let my parents know what I have done because I can imagine my father will beat me up crazily, which wasn`t the major reason that persuade me into quitting smoking. I didn`t realize that smoking can kill me until there was a party night a year ago. We all went crazy, I was choked by too much smoking on that night, and the feeling was I almost passed out before I went to bed. It was so serious that I couldn`t even stand straight after too much smoking. I felt dizzy all night long when I was lying in bed. I dreamed I was going to die since I got a deadly lung cancer, which was caused by smoking. I sweated so bad, and woke up all of a sudden at the moment before I stepped into the hell. I scared my dream might become reality, so I quitted smoking determinedly.

To governments, smoking is a controversial issue. For one thing, they concern about the public health, on the other hand, they also concern about their major tax payer. Actually, they have no way to prohibit cigarettes selling, or reduce the purchase of smoker. It depends on the smokers, who are willing to quit smoking if the governments try to persuade smokers into quitting it. Personally, I eager to quit smoking since I have realized how serious this could be, and I am making friends more carefully when I am studying in America. Now, few of them are smokers, and no one try to encourage me smoking any more. That was the process of how I changed my mind about smoking.