We call a disease that’s been caused by smoking a smoking-related disease. Half of all long-term smokers die from smoking related diseases. And a half of that half die during or before middle age. Smoking kills. And remember, it kills slowly and painfully. Smoking can kill you in plenty of ways. The most common, and best known, smoking related diseases are heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive lung disease (COLD).

Vascular Disease
You know that smoking causes heart disease and strokes. You might also know that some smokers have to have legs amputated. All these problems are types of vascular disease. Vascular means ‘to do with blood vessels’, so veins or arteries. Cigarette smoke makes fatty gunk clog up your blood vessels. It also makes your blood more likely to clot. When blood’s having problems getting from one place to another, because it’s being blocked by fatty goo, it travels more slowly and is more likely to clot, or dry up. If it clots, it makes a blockage. That blockage might stop blood getting to your heart, and cause you to have a heart attack, or it might stop blood from your heart reaching a part of your body like your legs. If that happens, if the circulation’s cut off, your legs, or hands, or wherever, die. They literally die. And they’ll start to rot, just like a corpse.

And to stop the rot – gangrene – spreading, those legs, or hands, or wherever, will have to be amputated –chopped off. If the gunk blocks arteries in your brain, which it might well, blood won’t be able to get to sections of your brain. Those sections will die. You’ll be left with chunks of dead brain and you won’t be able to do any of the things that those sections used to control. You might find that you can’t see, or that you can’t speak. Or that the left side of your body is paralysed. When this happens, when blood gets blocked in your brain, you’re having a stroke.

- Heart disease is Cardiovascular disease
- Strokes are Cerebrovascular disease
- Gangrene is Peripherovascular disease
Three very nasty ways to suffer from one basic problem – clogged arteries.

Clogging aside, though, the basic nicotine, carbon monoxide combination that smoking provides is a real strain on the heart.

Carbon monoxide starves your heart of the oxygen it needs. Nicotine pushes your blood pressure up and forces it to work harder. Your heart’s not happy.

Think about it. If you were made to run miles and miles and miles, and you weren’t allowed to take a break, or to have a snack, not even allowed to drink some water, you would, eventually, have to stop. That’s the position your hearts in. And if it can’t cope, if it stops, well, RIP.

Cancer
Cigarette smoke, like asbestos, is a ‘Class A Carcinogen’. That means it’s a Class A cancer causer. Anything it touches is put at risk of cancer. There are the obvious places: the mouth, the lips, the lungs. But chemicals in the smoke gets everywhere – creep right through your body. That means that smoking puts you at risk of almost all cancers.

Lung Cancer
The cancer a smoker is most likely to develop is lung cancer. Every time a smoker inhales, his or her lungs are filled with poisonous, acrid smoke. Little particles of tar, which is crammed with carcinogens – cancer causing chemicals – stick to the lungs with each drag. Over time these little specks fill the lung with thick brown-black, treacly sludge. It’s this ultra-poisonous sludge which can react with your body to produce a cancerous tumour.

Almost one in four smokers will develop lung cancer. 95% of lung cancer sufferers in the UK die within 5 years of diagnosis. Most die within one year.

Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (COLD)
We’ve all had colds, but, thankfully, most of us don’t suffer from COLD. The name COLD covers asthma, bronchitis and emphysema. Most people who suffer from either chronic bronchitis or from emphysema also suffer from elements of the other.

Bronchitis takes two main forms, chronic and acute. Acute bronchitis is something most of us suffer from occasionally, normally as part of a virus. Bronchitis means a chesty cough caused by excess mucous.

Chronic means permanent. So chronic bronchitis is permanent bronchitis. It’s often, but not always, caused by smoking. Like lung cancer it develops when tar settles in the lung. Your tissue doesn’t like being covered in toxic tar. It reacts by producing extra mucous or phlegm. In mild cases chronic bronchitis makes you short of breath when you exercise and makes you cough, even though you don’t have a cold. You’ll probably cough up phlegm in the morning, because it’s been building up in your lungs all night. ‘Smoker’s cough’ is actually quite a nice name for hacking up snot daily. In more serious cases, you’ll have real difficulty breathing just walking to your local shop, you’ll regularly cough up slime, and (inside) the airways of your lungs will be hardened and narrowed. In more extreme cases, you’ll suffocate to death.

Emphysema is even nastier than chronic bronchitis. Your lung just disintegrates. You can’t breath, you die.

Asthma is a common condition that many people are born with and many more develop. Asthmatics have very sensitive airways which become inflamed easily when they are irritated – by a substance which the asthmatic is allergic to, e.g. cat hair. When the airways become inflamed they swell up and become narrower – this makes it harder for the asthmatic to breathe: he/she has an asthma attack. Smoking hasn’t been proven to cause asthma, but smoke, and second-hand smoke, can certainly inflame the airways and trigger attacks in some asthmatics.