People who defend smoking cigarettes. »
I don’t get it.
The following is the dumbest logic I’ve ever seen. If your lungs are in working order, the tar and other chemicals isn’t going to automatically just sit there and accumulate because that’s not what bodies are designed to do. It will take years of damage to make your body less efficient at processing the chemicals, and at a different rate for each person. So there is no way to say “it takes only 3 years to suffocate from tar in the lungs” because there are a lot of messed up assumptions in that.
But then again, I’m just in first year Biology. What do I really know. (Not a lot, but some stuff.)
In the United Kingdom, full strength cigarettes contain 10mg of ‘tar’, and in America they contain 20mg of ‘tar’. For arguments’ sake, we will use the American levels as this would accumulate faster. The lung capacity of an average adult human is about six litres, which is 6,000 cubic centimetres. At room temperature, one cubic centimetre (one ml) of water weighs about one gram. Tar however, being an oily substance, floats on water, so one ml weighs less than a gram. The exact density of tar depends on its composition. Tar is usually a mixture of many different oily chemicals. At its densest though, one gram of tar occupies about 1.25 ml of volume. At 20 mg (0.025 ml) of “tar” per cigarette, it would take at least 50 cigarettes to yield one gram of “tar”. That’s two and a half packs of cigarettes. This means that, if you smoke one pack of full flavour cigarettes, you would have about 0.5 ml of “tar” in your lungs. Because your lungs hold about 6,000 ml of air, you would have to smoke about 12,000 packs of cigarettes to completely fill them with “tar”. Smoking one pack per day, that would take about 33 years. This means that anyone who started smoking at age 15 would have nothing but a thick slurry of tar oozing out of their nose and mouth by age 48. There would be no air left in his or her lungs at all, just “tar”. This however, is not the end of the story. Obviously, if your lungs were completely filled with tar, then you would suffocate and die. Your lungs do not have to be completely filled to result in suffocation; about a cup (500 ml) will do. That’s only about 1,000 packs of full flavoured cigarettes. You could do that in just under three years at a pack a day. If the popular myths about cigarette “tar” were true, then every pack-a-day smoker would be dead, from suffocation, before the end of three years.
