There's nothing like a graphic demonstration of the consequences of smoking to turn the stomach and the teen from the cigarette

Try as hard as you may, no matter how eloquent you may be, so matter how striking your description of the dangers of smoking, your words just can't beat an image of the effects of smoking on the body. For one thing, you're asking the listener to imagine something they have never seen. Similes just don't bring out the horrible damage smoking does to the human body. What better way to make the point when trying to keep our children away from tobacco and provoke our adults to drop the habit and breathe again, then by showing them the effect graphically?

The dangers of smoking can best be shown through images of the damage it does. Show them what the hairy tongue of smoking looks like, and show them one covered with cancer. There's one poster that shows both, one showing a whitened tongue in the upper half, the same tongue two months later, coated in yellow-green cancer. Another poster shows a young girl smoking, and, as if openings in her body, places where smoking is doing its damage, the brain, the lips, the heart, the stomach, the lung, all in a cancerous or weakened state. These are just some of the many pictures that can be purchased for instruction on the dangers of smoking, compelling to say the least, chilling might be the better word.

Pictures are indeed compelling, but just as compelling are samples of a tobacco polluted body. There is one product, a transparent, plastic jar half filled with a soup of tar,  nicotine, and cigarette butts, a nauseating image of the cause of chronic obstructive lung disease, one of those terrible dangers of smoking that we cannot see with our bare eyes. This model depicts one year's use of cigarettes at twenty a day. One look at this thing, and you'll want to stay far, far away from cigarettes.

Perhaps the most convincing example of the dangers of smoking is a simulated smoker's lung. There's one that has a small set of transparent lungs, plastic, over an ashtray. When you burn a cigarette in the ash tray, you can actually watch this lung turn brown. Another one is an inflatable swine lung that has been stained to show the effects. Most cogent is the one that shows a healthy lung, pink and smooth, and a lung blackened by tobacco smoke. Makes you choke to see it, but it's designed to turn smokers and potential smokers away from this still cruel killer of all ages.

If you want to give the potential smoker the experience of smoking a cigarette, you can get a product that is a plastic cigarette. When the user inhales through it, it cause “air hunger” at once. Here's what you're buying into, a life of gagging.

All these products are available on the internet and are recommended, along with your speech and descriptions, to impact the endangered smoker or potential smoker with the truth about smoking, that it causes death.

Smoking Withdrawal Symptoms are a Small Price to Pay

Doctors all around the world agree on one thing: the sooner you quit smoking the better your chances of not getting lung cancer and dying. It is a fact that smoking has killed millions and millions of people around the world and the Surgeon General’s 1982 announcement was that “"Cigarette smoking is the major single cause of cancer mortality in the United States." This remains true today although smoking-related deaths have gone down in 2009 according to the latest figures. This is due to more people stopping smoking and is a trend that is expected to continue. Young people are getting the word out because of school programs like DARE.


For most heavy smokers quitting cold turkey is not an appealing or realistic way to stop smoking. Smoking withdrawal symptoms are much worse when you quit all at once as opposed to a gradual quit smoking program. Many experts however will tell you that it is just like getting into a cold pool. You are better off just jumping in getting it over with. Even when you use the patch or nicotine gum or one of the newest designer drugs, you will still have smoking withdrawal symptoms, just not as pronounced.

We all know that going cold turkey will make you feel the smoking withdrawal symptoms stronger but what we are not told is that the symptoms will last for a much shorter period of time, just like jumping into the cold pool. If you can stand the smoking withdrawal symptoms then you can make a clean break.

Each year thousands of people quit smoking and a lot of them just go cold turkey. Most of these people succeed in cutting tobacco and cigarettes out of their lives for good. It is not because they have any special secret it is just that they are mentally tougher and able to withstand the smoking withdrawal symptoms without giving in.

Smoking withdrawal symptoms can vary from individual to individual but usually they are jittery nerves, hunger, and of course, a powerful craving to smoke. In a way you can really compare these smoking withdrawal symptoms to food withdrawal when you go on a diet. If you are eating a lot and then go on a drastic caloric reduction program you will feel headaches, irritation, weakness, light headedness, and other symptoms. But if you stick to the diet and don’t cheat you will get past the symptoms in two or three days. Smoking withdrawal symptoms may last a good while longer but one thing is for certain: the longer you go without smoking, the easier it gets to stop smoking.

You can do it. The health benefits of stopping smoking are many. Better heart health, circulation, blood pressure, digestion, you name it, stopping smoking will make it better. You will want to exercise more and you will have a tremendous surge in energy and mental acumen. So do yourself a favor. Whether it is with a patch or a supplement or just plain cold turkey, quit smoking today and start living again.