Hi kehhkgch,

You might get a lot of very irritable people that made things worse, because they were suffering withdrawal symptoms

I think it would be good for everyone’s health if there was no smoking, but no – I don’t think it would help solve any of the bigger problems we face, because at the heart of many of them is human nature.

Probably not; I think pollution from smoking is miniscule compared to things like cars and planes.

Though, if we converted tobacco fields into forests, that would help!

Hi kehhkgch….interesting question and one I had not thought about until now. Cigarette smoke emits a number of nasty gases and particles so perhaps if everyone on the entire planet stopped smoking it would:

a) reduce the amount of particles containing substances that can cause cancer from being in the air that we breath;

b) reduce the litter from fag butts left on the pavement;

c) less carbon dioxide emissions from the energy used to make them and less water consumption from the processing of the tobacco leaves;

d) less use of paper in the packaging of cigarettes and therefore less need for trees to be felled to supply that paper;

but….

a) an industry supporting low paid workers would disappear…what would they do next?

that’s just a few…and I’ll probably think of a few more on the way home!:)

Hi kehhkgch, I think if everybody gave up smoking that would lead to much less health-care service utilisation (less people going to doctors and hospital). People would live a lot longer too. The amount of money we have to spend on smoker’s health-care problems would go down but might be balanced by the amount of money we have to spend caring for a longer living population (your care bill goes up as you age too).

I don’t know how that would work out economically but i bet that other factors like less sick-days, longer useful working lives would mean it came out in favour of smoking stopping. I suspect we would have more money to spend on research into non-smoking related diseases and would make more progress on these. I don’t know if it would have environmental benefits I suspect not (maybe Paula knows?).

Wow good question. i’ll be thinking about this for weeks.