Opinions of Saturday, 1 June 2019

Columnist: Raymond Acquah

Ban cigarettes completely

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According to the American Journal of Public Health(2008) teens who watch anti-smoking ads aimed at young people were actually 36% more likely to smoke! The tobacco industry employs insidious reverse psychology in these ads deliberately designed to get teens to smoke!

Tobacco even when used as directed kills 1/3 to 1/2 of its consumers! Smoking kills 1 person every 6 seconds meaning approx. 30 people died since i started writing this post!

Agonizing, brutal and excruciating death! They manufacture them to be addictive. In just the last few years they've increased the amount of nicotine in the average cigarette by 11.6% to make them even more addictive! Recently we learnt that the tobacco companies have been adding an ammonium based compound to cigarettes for years to increase absorption of the nicotine its basically the same principle used in crack cocaine!

The tobacco industry is like a nest of cockroaches they will always find a way to survive.

They can't advertise on T.V but they've hired P.R agents to hook them up with the film industry and its working because researchers estimate that smoking in movies delivers nearly 400,000 new adolescent smokers annually! Everytime you try to kill the cockroach it finds another way, it has to, because when you make a product that kills off your consumers you have to find a way to recruit new customers.

They use social and psychological profiling targetting potential smokers by gender, age etc! Cockroaches don't discriminate! This is not how corporations with a conscience behave!

How in Gods name are cigarettes even LEGAL! They are a deadly concoction of carcinogens that damage every single organ in your body! Why are they not TOTALLY BANNED ? Because its a free world, freedom of choice is a Ghanaian ideal! Worth someone dying every 6s! How can any company knowingly manufacture a product that poisons its users and make that product look cool, hip, sexy and fun so they can get children to consume them. How can any society tolerate them, but we do???

People are smoking day in day out and dying and dying whiles the tobacco company keeps getting richer and richer! How can we tolerate this????