What is tobacco? Tobacco is a plant. Its leaves are dried and then packed into cigarettes or cigars for smoking. Alternatively, tobacco can be processed into chewing tobacco, also called "chaw", "snuff", and "spit tobacco".

What does smoking do? People claim it tastes good, feels good, and looks cool. On the downside, tobacco has over 4,000 harmful chemicals that can cause things such as colds, coughing, loss of taste and smell, premature wrinkles, sleeping problems, mouth sores, and foul smelling clothes and hair.

Is chewing or smokeless tobacco safer? No. It's true that many people believe that using smokeless tobacco is not as bad as smoking. In fact, one study quoted in the Surgeon General's Report said that 77 percent of kids thought cigarette smoking was very harmful, but only 40 percent thought smokeless tobacco was very harmful. Very wrong! The truth is that smokeless tobacco use is connected with a large number of problems. Smokeless tobacco can cause bleeding gums and sores of the mouth that never heal, and can eventually even cause cancer.

What about the long-term effects? Nicotine, a major component of tobacco, is highly addictive. Some former smokers and chewers say they never lose the craving even years after they have quit. If they do quit, they (and everyone around them) have to deal with things like anxiety, irritable behavior, fatigue, headaches, weight gain, high blood pressure, and other unpleasant effects.

Who smokes? Approximately 60,000,000 Americans smoke, including 18 percent of adolescents age 12-17. In fact, most new smokers are teenagers, particularly girls. Tobacco use causes more deaths each year in the United States than AIDS, alcohol, cocaine, heroine, homicide, suicide, and motor vehicle crashes combined. Smoking is a major risk factor for heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic lung diseases; all leading causes of death. Each day, 6,000 persons younger than age 18 try their first cigarette, and more than 3,000 of them become daily smokers. One thousand of these young people will die from smoking-related causes. Direct medical care costs from smoking total at least $50 billion each year.

Know the Facts:

• Cigarette smoking is perhaps the most devastating preventable cause of disease and premature death.
  
  
• Nearly 450,000 smokers die each year.
  
  
• People say that kissing a smoker is like kissing an ashtray.
  
  
• Nearly one in five high school males use spit tobacco.
  
  
• Continuous intake of spit tobacco (smokeless tobacco) leads to various oral cancers and a host of other diseases, in addition to bad breath.
  
  
• Cigarettes are highly addictive. One-third of young people who are just "experimenting" end up being addicted by the time they are 20 years old.
  
  

Source: Center for Disease Control and Prevention Office on Smoking and Health, February 2001.