Third Hand Smoking Sociology

I have selected the photograph of the cigarette.
Smoking is when you inhale burnt dried leaves of tobacco that has been rolled onto a piece of paper forming a cylindrical shape. People smoke everywhere; in their houses, at the bus stop, coffee shops and sometimes on the corner of the street where you work. Active smoking has been known to cause familiar diseases like lung cancer, heart problems, respiratory issues and more. What people generally don’t see is that it not only affects the person smoking, but affects the people in their surroundings on a bigger scale. C. Wright Mills talks about looking at the bigger picture of things in a way that not only affects an individual, but has a broader social meaning and a burden to the public (Mills,
The term may have started off on a humour column in the Washington Post (1995) but it is now a legitimate problem. Third hand smoking occurs when intoxicants that sticks on room and car surfaces, even after the smoke has diffused into the air (Bell, 2014). Mills questions the structure of society and asks how they are related (Mills, 2010). How third hand smoke relates to the society is that when the public breathes in the residue, they do not realise the danger of it. Even after the act of smoking has ended, there is still residual nicotine from tobacco smoke absorbed into indoor surfaces that reacts with the ambient nitrous acid to form carcinogenic tobacco- specific nitrosamines which has been deemed as an ‘underappreciated health hazard’ (Bell, 2014). There were many news articles and journals written that mentioned how third hand smoking affects children, especially babies who are more prone to be affected by this. The residue is recognised as an enduring, potent carcinogen (Bell, 2014). Third hand smoke therefore has justified not only affecting an individual’s health but affects the people in the surroundings of where they
Wright Mills has noted that the sociological imaginations were things that happen on a bigger phenomenon instead of just an individual. It is something for people to think about how their own actions affect the society around them. All three points mentioned throughout the essay have brought to light ways that smoking affects the society. Smoking increases the mortality risk every time a person puffs a cigarette and breathes in the polluted air. The community would breathe it in and have a higher risk of contracting a terminal disease. When the air has been polluted, the residue does not diffuse into the air, however it sticks to its surroundings and react with each other to form something that is even more dangerous. This would eventually lead to people needing more medical attention because they fall ill and, due to the increase in medical attention, the cost of medical care would also eventually rise. This concludes the fact that smoking causes a chain reaction within the health sector which burdens