The Importance Of Smoking

Smoking does not satisfy any basic human need such as eating and drinking. It is an artificial desire to increase one's feeling of comfort and pleasure. Therefore, only humans smoke; animals do not. Of course, there is no objection to fact that it is an "artificial" and not a "natural" need. Neither fine cuisine, nor listening to music, nor any of the arts is "natural". They are all needs of a higher kind that have become a part of culture, and it is to culture that the chairman of the German Federation of Cigarette Manufacturers Günter Wille, appeals. He sees culture legitimatizing smoking: "Smoking is part of culture." But it is not that easy. Many atrocities hiding behind the halo of culture are repugnant by any objective moral standards;

However, it seems that as early as the time of the Roman Empire people smoked. This was not tobacco, of course, which was not yet known by Europeans, but rather Cyprus grass, coltsfoot, and lavender. They smoked more for therapeutic reasons than for pleasure. The first Europeans who brought the smoking of tobacco to Europe were sailors who had accompanied Columbus on his voyages to the "New World". There the smoking of tobacco was widespread amongst almost all of the indigenous peoples of North America except those in the Arctic regions. For the most part this was for ritual purposes. Among Europeans tobacco was used initially in Spain, and was seen more as a medicine than a stimulant. In the sixteenth century tobacco was grown as an ornamental plant in French gardens where it was considered a panacea against the plague, toothache, gout, colic, and tetanus. Smoking was introduced to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1586, where it soon spread to all classes of society. The "drinking of tobacco",[4] as it was then called, migrated via Holland and France across the Rhine. During the Thirty Years' War it was spread all over central Europe, especially by Swedish soldiers. There were, however, numerous prohibitions made against it, for example by the Czar in 1634, or by Sultan Amurat IV in 1610. The punishment for violating the Czar's edict was the loss of one's nose. Sultan Amurat's edict went further in that smoking was

However, an awareness of the problem has only emerged since it has become known what an enormous public health, threat smoking represents[12] and what an economic strain it puts on health insurance companies as a whole[13]. Smoking is no longer accepted as a matter of course. The mood has changed.[14] It has been recognised that smoking is part of the environmental problem. At the first European tobacco conference in 1988 in Madrid the World Health Organization (WHO) passed a "Charter against Tobacco" which states "air free of tobacco smoke is an essential part of our basic right to healthy and unpolluted