Tobacco and Nicotine

Tobacco is the prepared leaves of several plants of the nightshade family, used for smoking or chewing as snuff. The tobacco plant is native to tropical America and is now wildly grown all over the world. You can find tobacco in cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and chewing tobacco (snuff). Nicotine is a poisonous alkaloid contained in the leaves, roots and seeds of tobacco plants. It is used as an insecticide and sometimes used in medicine.

Tobacco and nicotine are very harmful substances that have many harmful effects on humans as well as animals. People who chew tobacco are likely to develop problems in the mouth. Tobacco also inhibits antibodies that protect your gums. If you chew tobacco for a long period of time in the same spot in your mouth, it can burn a hole right through your mouth. Tobacco develops sores in your mouth and gives you gingivitis, an irritation of the gums causing puffiness. Even though tobacco models display gleaming white teeth if you use tobacco your teeth turn yellow. Tobacco also gives you oral carcinoma of lateral border of the tongue.

Tobacco does not just harm your mouth but it also harms all other places in your body. Inhaling tobacco can give you lung cancer or respiratory problems. When you inhale tobacco, the tobacco destroys the cilia in your esophagus. The cilia protects you from diseases, so you are more likely to become sick then a person who does not inhale tobacco. Tobacco destroys lung tissue so you are more prone to lung cancer. If tobacco gets into your blood stream it takes away oxygen in your blood, slowing down physical activity. Tobacco also harms many parts of your body, like your liver and pancreas. Swallowing tobacco will also cause damage to your stomach.

There are different ways to smoke tobacco. The most common cigarettes, a small role of thin sheets of treated paper for smoking. There are pipes, a tube with a bowl of clay or wood or another material at one end for smoking, cigars, a tight role of cured tobacco leaves for smoking. And smokeless tobacco, which teens think is better for you, but isn't.

Teenagers think that smokeless tobacco is safer than cigarettes. They are wrong. Smokeless tobacco can cause bleeding gums, or sores, in the mouth that will never go away. Smokeless tobacco can also give you holes in your mouth that go all the way through.

Tobacco has benefits. It is useful if you are trying to kill insects because insects are so small it will kill them instantly. Some gardeners put tobacco on their plants so the insects will stay away. Tobacco has the same ingredients as rat poison (cyanide), dead frog preserver (formaldehyde), and toilet bowel cleaner (ammonia).

Nicotine is the drug in the tobacco product that gets you addicted to the tobacco product. Once a person inhales nicotine they are addicted to it. It is very hard to get off nicotine just as it would be hard to stop using an illegal drug.

There are many facts about tobacco and nicotine but the one main fact is that when taken by smoking or chewing, it never does any good for a person.
 

Written by Meridith Emmer and Meghan O'Loughlin

Silhouettes by Christina Damiano and Jessica Givner

Illustration by James Carfora