How To: Procure Diseases Your Insurance Won't Cover

        Smoking cigarettes is an expensive habit, yet impoverished Americans who struggle to afford food purchase and smoke more cigarettes every day than the upper-class will in three. One of the main reasons this demographics’ smoking rates are so high is that America’s working class is much less educated than their hierarchical superiors. Over 728,000 Americans have GED certifications, and 45.2% of them smoke. Destitute high schoolers, if they graduate and are able to attend college, go to affordable institutions where they train for their future jobs and accumulate debt. The intention of this process is to acquire a job that will help pay rent, not to absorb knowledge and become a professor. These trade schools do not spend time discussing the harmful effects of smoking with their students, so the last anti-smoking appeal pitched at them would have been in high school or elementary school, along with the rest of their education that is no longer of much practical use.
        These members of the lower class are now “likely to report that smoking is allowed inside their workplace,”. This drastically increases the amount of time per day they are breathing in secondhand smoke, which “causes heart disease and lung cancer in nonsmoking adults,”. Then there’s thirdhand smoke, defined as “residual tobacco smoke pollutants that adhere to the clothing and hair of smokers and to surfaces,” which are carcinogenic and evidently more dangerous to nonsmokers than secondhand smoke, because they stick to surfaces for indefinite amounts of time. All these risks simply apply to nonsmokers who are often in the presence of smokers.
        The likelihood of these Americans dying from a tobacco related death skyrockets if they choose to take up smoking themselves, if they haven’t already. Americans living below the poverty line use cigarettes for decades longer than a smoker with a high socioeconomic status, start smoking at earlier ages, and are 55% more likely to take up smoking again three months after a quitting attempt. Smoking while living under the poverty line, like 28.9% of the currently impoverished (compared to 6.3% of Americans with graduate degrees), is a downward spiral towards lung cancer, as well as a multitude of other possible dangers directly caused by smoking.