The Road To Freedom

Remember your very first cigarette and how great it tasted? If you do then you are not thinking about your first.

Let me remind you - You are standing nervously with your friends while one experienced smoker produces the mystical, forbidden treat. Everyone else has one and they all look cool so what the hell - let's see what all the fuss is about. You put the cigarette in your mouth and your friend lights it for you. You suck the smoke into your mouth and because you have seen others do it you take a big deep breath. The first cloud of smoke travels deep into your lungs and then what? Do you exhale in that cool way that your friends do? No. You cough as though your lungs are going to burst, then you turn green, feel dizzy and think you are going to be sick.

Why?

You inhaled over 3000 different chemicals to your body including 42 substances that are known to cause cancer - and all in just one breath. 3000 is a lot to look at so let's simplify it and look at just two elements - smoke and nicotine.

Smoke

The smoke you inhaled on that first occasion felt heavy on your lungs, it didn't taste very nice and it made you cough like never before. Those were three things that should have told you that your body did not appreciate that first experience of smoking. Under any other circumstances you would be going to the doctor to find out what was wrong with you. But because you know that it was caused by the smoke, you accepted it - indeed this is what you have now come to regard as a pleasure!

But what about the feeling of nausia? For that, we must thank our other close friend, nicotine...

Nicotine

The nicotine was absorbed very rapidly into your blood stream and travelled straight to your brain. Nicotine is a stimulant that makes your heart beat faster and increases blood circulation. What was wrong before? Was your blood travelling too slowly? No. So why the need to speed it up? Your body was getting on just fine before so why the need to upset it?

You felt light-headed with that first puff of smoke because the oxygen that was being carried round your body to feed your brain and muscles was replaced, without warning, by the nicotine and the other chemicals you inhaled - the result was that not enough oxygen got to your brain and its reaction was to let you know by making you feel dizzy - to let you know to take in more air.

The sickness you felt was your body telling you that your body had been invaded by something that it did not like. This was because it had been poisoned and was trying to cope with the multitude of foreign substances.

Your body does not do things without good reason - you coughed because your lungs wanted to reject the smoke, you were dizzy because your brain was lacking oxygen and you felt sick because you had just poisoned yourself.

HELLO? What else do you want it to do? How much more obvious could it be that smoke is not welcome in your body?

Thank God you had all of those warnings. What would you have done without your body telling you it didn't need or want you to smoke? You might just have had another one. You did?

You had better read on..