Even tobacco companies are now admitting that smoking is deadly.  Each year, smoking can be blamed for nearly half of all premature deaths (more than 400,000).  It continues to be the greatest public health hazard we encounter.  Although we cannot predict who will get it, we do know that smoking can cause lung cancer. However, there are certain aspects of health which are predictable when an individual smokes, such as aging of the arteries. Every smoker will develop this health problem. Aging of the arteries eventually inevitably causes wrinkling of the skin, impotence, heart disease, stroke, and memory loss. The diseased arteries cause the same problems throughout your entire body whether they travel to your reproductive organs, skin, or heart. 

Smoking ages skin prematurely in two important ways: first it ages your arteries; and second, it decreases the ability of your lungs to provide oxygen to your blood. Through these two mechanisms, smoking decreases the oxygen that gets to your skin cells, causing them to age faster than they should.  It also causes emphysema in many people which is a shortness of breath.  This lack of oxygen also further ages your lungs by diminishing the ability of your immune system to work normally, leading to a high incidence of respiratory illnesses, plus a loss of stamina and energy.  It also clogs your arteries with inflammation that leads to high blood pressure, which further ages your arteries in addition to the increased vulnerability to infections. 

Some experts have estimated that for the American population as a whole, smoking makes us more than 250 million years older than we need to be.  When you consider the $350 billion in tobacco settlements recently, it seems like the tobacco industry's actually getting off pretty cheap.  If you consider the value of each year of lost life at $50,000, the tobacco companies would have to pay us 36 times that settlement.  According to Michael F. Roizen M.D., in his book The Real Age Makeover, a smoker with a pack a day habit should consider themselves eight years older.  According to his perspective if you're 40, you should probably consider yourself to be about 48.  If you’re 50, you’re actually 58. Even if you smoke just four cigarettes a day, which is a very small amount for your average smoker, he states your “Real Age” is 2.6 years older.  Even if you don't smoke but ingest secondhand smoke in a smoke-filled environment for just four hours a day, you should consider yourself almost 7 years older. 

The greatest winners in the smoking legislative wars have been employees of bars and restaurants that now prohibit smoking. Senate leader Joe Bruno and state legislators in New York who pushed through anti-smoking legislation in New York probably have saved restaurant and bar owners and workers more than 4 million years of aging and hundreds of millions in lawsuits.  Fortunately, it's not only occurring in New York, as of the summer of 2003, California, Delaware, Florida and Connecticut now have statewide laws in effect to prohibit smoking in workplaces.