Cigarettes have been an issue in our society for as long as we can remember. The hazards of smoking are known to the public yet people still smoke; putting their selves, and the people around them, at risk. Cigarettes are destroying our forests and wildlife leaving our country with a damaged environment and an empty wallet. If cigarette littering doesn’t stop now who knows what will be left of our environment a few decades from now.
Many smokers agree that nicotine, found in cigarettes, is more addictive then cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. The point is that once you start smoking it is very hard to stop. After you’re addicted you‘ll probably start disposing your cigarettes on someone else’s property, in a river or lake, or even in a forested area.
Now let’s say some smoker chooses to discard their cigarette on someone else’s property. The next thing you know more and more people choose to litter where the first smoker just did. Within a couple of months the property is scattered with cigarettes; a job that may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up. If you don’t take my word for it Philadelphia Daily News states, "School officials say landscapers who should be planting flowers and pruning shrubs are spending time instead picking up butts on the 15,000-acre campus: Some 13 landscapers spend 10 hours a week picking up discarded cigarettes at an estimated cost of $150,000."
If a smoker decides they will toss their cigarette into some local waterway they are harming all the wildlife living there, especially a water flea called Daphnia Magma, which is highly vulnerable to the chemicals found in cigarettes. This water flea is at the bottom of the food chain so if these creatures die off then the whole food chain will be disrupted when the bigger fish are trying to find their next meal.
The one scenario that might be considered most deadly is cigarettes that cause forest fires. When a smoker disposes a cigarette in a wooded or grassy area, the cigarette ignites the vegetation around it and starts what will soon become an unstoppable fire. Every year nine hundred people die in the United States by fires stared by cigarettes. The amount of money spent to deal with these fires that were kindled by smokers is six billion dollars every year.
A solution to this problem is that every state could pass a statute (a state law) banning cigarettes. You are probably thinking that this could never happen but what if the national government gave money to every state that passes this statue. This worked before when all of the states had the same legal driving ages except Louisiana. They bribed Louisiana to raise the age limit of getting your drivers license and it worked. What differentiates that solution from the solution I am proposing?

People against banning cigarettes say that this could never happen because of the rights of Americans. This doesn’t make sense because marijuana is banned in most states, so states can ban cigarettes without infringing on American’s freedoms. Unfortunately, most people are siding with the opposition. Less than one in five Americans support banning cigarettes. CVS pharmacy recently made a stand and refused to sell cigarettes in their stores from now on. This proves that the fray is not yet over.
Why should our environment always on the losing side of smoker’s indolent acts? Smokers are becoming more and more apathetic of their surroundings. There has to be a change or else we will have a crippled environment and no more money. What befuddles me the most is if cigarettes are doing this much damage to our economy and environment then why hasn’t the government given more attention to this issue?