[Letter] Why you shouldn’t smoke

I smoke. I have been smoking for about a year, and there are many disadvantages to smoking.

To begin with, there is the health problem. Everybody knows that smoking is not beneficial for one’s health. Being the root of various diseases, it’s full of toxic chemical compounds that severely damage smokers’ health. It considerably lowers smokers’ lung capabilities.

There is no problem in smokers’ self-destructive behavior if it’s what they wish to do, but the real problem, however, is in what happens to non-smokers. It is reported that about 1,300 people die from smoking every day, and a good percentage of those are non-smokers dying from secondhand smoke.

Therefore, smoking should be considered a felony as it kills innocent people.

Also, smoking can be a social drawback. We know a lot of people despise the smell of cigarettes. You might be one of them. This can have negative influences on social relationships, business and likewise. Would you want to be the person others avoid?

Finally, financial matters come into play. I calculated how much I spend on smoking. The answer was quite shocking. Smoking is an expensive pastime, in fact, it costs a fortune. If a person smokes one pack of cigarettes every day, and one pack costs 2,500 won, this means that he is wasting 17,500 won for a week, and about 910,000 won for a year.

This is a large amount of money, and there are so many more productive things that we could do with that money. Donating money for hungry children in underdeveloped countries would be a thousand times better than spending money on smoking.

In a nutshell, it is crystal clear that smoking is malicious. One has to be really silly to smoke because it critically influences one’s health. Furthermore, smoking is socially disadvantageous. On top of that, it is a total waste of money. These are more than enough reasons to ban smoking. Would you like to spend money and spontaneously harm your body and become somebody people dislike? The choice is up to you. Han Jae-woo, university student