- The effects of tobacco, alcohol and drugs vary a lot depending on the substances and what kind of people are using them with what kinds of health conditions. However, almost all of them affect the brain in some way, even if it is only tobacco making a person feel calm after a stressful day. Aside from affecting the brain, many of these substances affect other parts of the body in different ways.
- Though tobacco can be used in a variety of ways, the most common way is to smoke it in a cigarette. Cigarettes are smoked by about one-third of the adult population in the world, according to the World Health Organization. This leads to many health problems because tobacco is now widely known to put people at an increased risk for lung cancer. Tobacco can also cause cancers of the larynx and mouth as well as put people at an increased risk of heart attacks.
- Alcoholic beverages come in a wide variety of different forms such as beer, wine, rum, gin, vodka, whiskey and others. Plus each of these different forms of alcohol can be made with different flavors. Alcoholic beverages have many health risks associated with them. Binge drinking, which is drinking a lot of alcoholic beverages at once, can cause nausea or death due to alcohol poisoning. Long-term negative health effects of heavy drinking include permanent liver and brain damage.
- Though there are many drugs that one can buy at a pharmacy that are quite good for people and beneficial as forms of medicine, the types of drugs being covered by this article are almost always illegal and, in most cases, dangerous to the human body. These are drugs like cocaine, heroin, marijuana, acid and methamphetamine. Though the effects vary widely from drug to drug, some of the negative health effects of these drugs include nausea, heart attacks, strokes, liver damage, brain damage, difficulty urinating, diarrhea or even death due to lung failures, overdoses, suicides or kidney failures.
- Though tobacco, alcohol and drugs all have serious consequences associated with them, several things should be kept in mind when considering why people may use these substances. Tobacco is still so widespread because it is believed to calm the nerves, and limitations on how tobacco companies can advertise are a relatively new political trend designed to combat tobacco companies making people see smoking as a fashionable thing to do. Alcohol is a common staple with any type of social gathering in almost every culture around the world, while low levels of daily alcohol consumption is believed to cause health benefits such as a reduced chance of heart attacks. And though most dangerous drugs have no health benefits, marijuana can be used for pain relief and to calm the nerves.
