By Toni Shavarsh, Freelance Photographer
This is a photo-story to show the harm that cigarettes cause in a rather soft and delicate manner. It is presented not in the ways we got used to: a doctor holding lungs over a human body deeply cut in the thorax, where the pathologist shows the harm of cigarettes by picking ruthlessly the organ and pointing some things painful and unbearable to look at.
So much has been done to show that cigarettes have perfidious nature. Everybody knows how harmful cigarettes are, how many harmful substances they contain, what kind of diseases they cause, in other words, nothings is new about cigarettes. It is also clear, at least for smokers if not for everyone else, how hard it is to stop smoking. Although cigarettes may be presented by certain people with the romantic wording of “Cigarettes can help you being alone with yourself” or “Cigarettes keep nostalgia for death”, cigarettes appear to be one of the most disgusting and stupid things. Smoking is not making you cute, but ridiculous and ill-mannered.
People should face the truth: the time of cigarettes passed long ago; those were the days when smoking was making you modern and stylish, when smoking was everywhere – in restaurants, cafés, cinemas and even in planes, all that was left long in the past when nobody even mentioned the danger hidden behind this delightful “pleasure”.
Nowadays the world is at war with cigarettes, fighting tooth and nail, mobilizing all resources and potentialities. Cigarettes are an enemy hard to defeat. Throughout their time of power cigarettes have gained a steady place on the market as a making-money product each minute and everywhere in the world. The worst, however, is that cigarettes have gained peoples’ confidence – a demon encountering you to offer an innocent game that you want to stop later but in vain. Cigarettes have taken the lives of millions of people who lived in this world with their dreams, opportunities and goals and who failed to dispel the demon in the beginning of the game and paid for this mistake with their lives.
Nowadays the culprit is sentenced; cigarettes are brought to the world trial to answer for all their acts and intents. The world is against cigarettes. There are many accusations but no advocate, nobody is willing to defend such an evil and the world delivers its sentence – smoking is prohibited in all public places, places for entertainment, institutions, vehicles, shops, streets; you are simply not allowed to smoke anywhere. If you are, however, willing to smoke, the other people will show you are mistaken, you will feel isolated and ignored; you will be deemed a criminal, since this is what you actually are – a criminal in the eyes of the others and a criminal acting mostly to his detriment, you are nothing but an outcast until you stop the game.
