As much as marketing strategies try to make you forget, yes, smoking still devastates. It still takes away family members and friends and ruins lives. It still causes cancer and emphysema and heart disease. So why do we ignore it? Why has it become such a normal hobby that no one wants to speak out against? Take a moment and think. Think of one good thing that comes from smoking. Hint: there aren't any. The commercials you see aren't over-exaggerating; smoking draws you in, gets you addicted, and then it kills you slowly and painfully.

The CDC lists tobacco as the number one cause of preventable disease and death in the US, with a grand total of 480,000 mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends being taken every year because they decided to give in to smoking. Smoking is still the leading cause of lung cancer in the US even though smoking rates have gone down in recent years. And no, it doesn't just cause lung cancer; it causes cancer of the throat, esophagus, stomach, kidney, bladder, cervix, and even some forms of leukemia.

Approximately 8.6 million people who smoke now live with a disease caused by it. And it's not just those who smoke who are affected; every year, 3,000 nonsmoking Americans die from exposure to secondhand smoking, and 33,000 die every year from coronary heart disease caused by secondhand smoking. While tobacco consumption rates are going down in developed countries like the US, it's still an epidemic in low and middle-income countries which house more than 80% of the world's 1 billion smokers. And no, it's not just cigarettes, but cigars and other tobacco as well.

I probably didn't need to convince you that smoking kills because anyone who's taken a high school health class has learned that it does. The message I'm trying to spread is how to help end tobacco dependence. If you have someone you love who smokes, help them quit. It won't be easy but it will be worthwhile. Don't stand idly by as someone pulls out a cigarette at a party, let them know how much it'll cost them. Don't watch as your family and friends willingly inhale poison into their bodies.

The enjoyment from smoking now is not worth the suffering that smokers put themselves and their families through later. If you smoke, pull yourself away from it. Yes, it will be painful and you'll feel like your world is ending, but it'll be a lot better than continuing to smoke, because smoking will, very painfully, cause your world to end for real. There are always resources to help you quit, such as smokefree.gov, quit.com, and cdc.gov all offer free advice and resources to get you the help you need.