SMOKE
Do you smoke? If you do it you never imagine the serious consequences that it would bring to your life. My Psychology class helped me to understand and think better about the damage of drugs, and how affect our central nervous system. Tobacco is a psychoactive drug with chemicals that affect our nervous system and, as a result, may alter consciousness and awareness, influence how we sense and perceive things, and modify our moods, feelings, emotions, and thoughts. In our days is very common to see people smoking; it is a widely used addictive drug, that alters cognitive processes, which include effects on attention and impulsivity, a mechanism that may contribute to the addictive properties of the drug.
Everyone have the right to think, analyze, and have their opinion, but I want to share with you a message, a story of my best friend where she suffered a disease and began a new life. All began a holiday day where our friends, among laughers, invited her to smoke her first cigarette and to learn like them. Then she came to smoke one after other cigarettes every day, until she gets to smoke three daily packs. Today I understand why she continued to smoke. She had an addiction to nicotine. My textbook said about addiction:” refers to a behavioral pattern of drug abuse that is marked by an overwhelming and compulsive desire to obtain and use drug; even after stopping, the person has a strong tendency to relapse and begin using the drug again”. My friend had become dependent to nicotine therefore she had become tolerant: “ tolerance means that after a person uses a drug repeatedly over a period of time, the original dose of the drug no longer produces the desire effect, so that a person must take increasingly larger doses of the drug to achieve the same behavioral effect”. She could not stop to smoke because her dependency to nicotine was too strong, “dependency refers to a change in the nervous system so that a person now needs to take the drug to prevent the occurrence of painful withdrawal symptoms.” She felt depressed and most when she knew that her life almost ended and he had withdrawal symptoms: “are painful physical and psychological symptoms that occur after a drug – dependent person using the drug”.
In 2005 she was diagnosed with lung disease and she had a surgery in the right lung removing the lower and middle lobes of her right lung. After a month of surgery she was an emergency and interned at the hospital because she got a pulmonary hypertension. She is alive today Thank a God and all people that gave her all the help and love, and she said “thanks” every day of her life for to have the most precious human: the life.
I invite you to stop smoking and think that your lives are worth more than a cigarette of any brand and size. Remember always, smoking is bad for your health because it produces a lot of damage and in extreme cases the death. It is necessary to maintain no-smoking laws in public places, any person who wish to smoke and relax can go to their own home where do not damage to nobody. Never is late, you can think about your life because your life is better than a cigarette.

References
Plotnik, Rod & Kouyoumdjian Haig (2011, 2008) Introduction to Psychology Ninth Edition.
Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol 127 (2), Apr, 2013 .pp. 303-310