As a Millennial, or someone age eighteen to thirty-five living in the United States, my generation is first to grow up entirely “anti-tobacco.” From my first years in a health classroom, my teachers have preached to me and my peers that smoking is horrific for one’s health. But as I left my sheltered hometown to come to a school with a student body as diverse as Penn State’s, I realized that my generation doesn’t care.
We don’t care how bad smoking is for our bodies. It’s truly incredible that in a world that has become utterly mesmerized by fitness fads, body cleanses and restaurants that are created on the basis of healthy, fresh foods and flavors, my generation still lights up a cigarette that literally rots a human body. Millennials have the highest smoking rate out of any generation in the United States. Somehow, regardless of the countless advertisements on the television, on music sharing websites like Spotify and Soundcloud, billboards in cities, for my generation, smoking continues to be undeniably sexy.
Here’s what I’ve noticed-- I cringe as I walk by students huddled outside the library smoking cigarettes and casually conversing with other students, but out at night, I don’t even notice the people who slip away from a party or a bar to smoke a few. The cigarette is the same cancerous killer regardless the place or the time of day.
Honestly, I’m not even immune to the appeal of cigarettes. I know how poor they are for my health and yet, I find myself in the mindset that one or two won’t kill me. It’s a new concept on college campuses-the idea of a social smoker. It seems as though those advertisements keep young adults from wanting to become a smoker, with those rotted teeth, fingernails, and premature wrinkles, but the idea of smoking socially is completely acceptable. I’m not writing to convince students everywhere to put down the pack for good, that even one of those cigarettes carves years out of your life and does damage to your bodies like nothing else,
I’m writing because social smoking is still a danger to anyone’s health.
Maybe by just smoking a few cigarettes a weekend takes away the stigma that someone’s a “smoker” but it doesn’t mean that those carcinogens are not flooding someone’s body.
