You might have been tired to hear over and over about the Surgeon General warning about the hazards of smoking.  

You might also think that you know all the facts and that you have made a choice to smoke based on informed consent.

Many if not all smokers do not know the least facts about smoking.  These are:

1) Loss of self-esteem.  Once and for so long you enter a world of broken promises when you could not even trust yourself that you could quit.  Everything in life afterwards falls in that gray area of uncertainty and doubt.

2) Cancer is not the worst that can happen from smoking.  Emphysema caused my father to depend on at least  3 injections a day of aminophylline to just be able to breath.  Aminophylline by mouth was not tolerated because emphysema causes the stomach as well as the whole body to ail.  

Emphysema is irreversible, crippling, and manifests itself mid-forties in smokers.  Non smokers suffer from emphysema late in their sixties.

3) If you see a carpet that looks like the smoker's lungs from inside you would not enjoy walking on it.  It is insane to dissociate the damage to the most vital filter of life, the lungs, from the joy of smoking.  

4) The carbon monoxide that competes with oxygen in binding to the blood hemoglobin prevents the delivery of oxygen to all vital tissues.  All organs are thus exposed to the hazards of accumulation of cellular byproducts.  Cancer and many pathological processes could take place anywhere in the body.

5) Nicotine constrict blood vessels and causes muscles to waste away.  Nicotine did a good job in the days when soldiers were fighting the old wars without hygienic modern day necessities.  Those old days teeth would rot in early life, skin disease were widespread due to lack of soap and fresh water, and fever was a killer until the discovery of antibiotics in 1940's.  Nicotine was a numbing drug that made soldier to tolerate their decaying teeth and itching sick skin.  Today nicotine is not called for.

6) Tar enters the lungs and resides there.  It induces lung scarring and tissue loss.