Warning: Must be at least 18 years or older to use nicotine or tobacco

Nicotine is the drug that you get addicted to when you use tobacco. Using tobacco is a bad thing to do in your life. Are you thinking of smoking, chewing or snorting tobacco? I hope you'll make a wise choice after you read this report.

Where it comes from

Tobacco comes from the plant called Nicotinia Tabacum that has another drug in it called nicotine. Nicotine is the drug you get addicted to when you have tobacco. Nicotine was also used to kill bugs. The tobacco plant is a relative to the plant called Petunia. Petunia gets its name from the word petum which is what the Tupi Indians named tobacco. When people get the tobacco from the plant they dry and shred the leaves. People then roll the tobacco in cigars or cigarettes or they smoke it in a pipe. Nicotine is a drug in tobacco. Nicotine is also in cigars, cigarettes, and pipes.

History

Scientists don't know, but they think that the Mayan Indians were the first to use tobacco. Tobacco was started in North and South America. Now tobacco is all over the world. The reason why the Mayan Indians used tobacco is because that they thought that it would kill evil winds and poisonous snakes. The Mayan Indians also thought that shooting stars were burning cigar butts thrown by Balam or Jaguar; their rain gods. Almost every Indian tribe that smoked tobacco did it for religious reasons. The Caribs or Brazilians smoked tobacco so their warriors would get courage before every battle they had to fight. The Virginia Indians threw powdered tobacco in water to appease the gods so that their fishing improved. The Osages Indians had a great spirit they believed in. Before anything important happened, they invited their great spirit to smoke with them. Some Indians said that using tobacco was so easy that they did it outside of ceremonies.

Nicotine and Cancer

The nicotine in tobacco, whether smoked, chewed, or snorted, causes a lot of types of cancer. Some of the kinds it causes are lung, esophagus, bladder, kidney, and stomach cancer. Lung cancer starts with a single cell. People don't know why the cell becomes so cancerous, but people do know that substances in tobacco do start cancer. The cancerous cell becomes larger, and starts to grow into a tumor.

The way kids get lung cancer is from secondhand smoke. Often times this comes from his or her parents smoking or someone close to them smoking. The smoke that comes out of the cigarettes goes into the air and people inhale the smoke. Secondhand smoke is more dangerous because the air has more gases and chemicals that can harm a kid.

Nicotine and Heart Disease

Smoking also can give you really high blood pressure and heart disease. There are about 170,000 deaths a year from people who smoke in the United States. Lung diseases occur more often from people who smoke than people who don't. If a woman smokes while she is pregnant her baby has a really good chance of not growing correctly in her stomach.

Chewing and Snorting Tobacco

Although smoking is the most common, tobacco can taken into the body in other ways. Chewing tobacco can give you mouth problems like losing your teeth, gingivitis, and gum ulcers. When people snort tobacco up their nose, all the drugs go into their nasal passages. Then it moves from their nose into the blood vessels beneath.

Nicotine and Emphysema

Another disease is Emphysema. This is when air sacs in your lungs that give oxygen to the blood get destroyed. As the walls between the air sacs collapse, some air sacs become larger, but because there are fewer air sacs, they provide less surface from which the oxygen can be absorbed.

I hope I have shown the main health risks from using tobacco and nicotine. You might end up with these main health issues from nicotine and tobacco: cancer of the mouth and throat, heart disease, hardened and narrowed blood vessels, smoker's cough, lung cancer, bronchitis and other chest infections.

 Smoker graphic on this page created by the
"Kids Making Healthy Choices" ThinkQuest team.