During the 1960s broadcast and billboard advertising a simple, evocative phrase was featured: “I’d rather fight than switch.” The visual media featured men or women with a black eye, a smile, and a burning cigarette at their fingertips. The cigarette was by Tareyton and the intent was to create and sustain loyalty to the brand. Of course, switching, at the time, meant to another cigarette brand; there were no other legal choices except to opt for the occasional cigar or pipe.

But Tareyton was merely standing on the shoulders of historic giants in marketing their brand by this strategy. The man upon whose shoulders all smokers and their manufacturers stand today was the man who brought smoking tobacco back to Europe from the New World, and eventually back to the modern New World: Sir Walter Raleigh.

Not particularly known for his marketing prowess – although in this regard he was fabulously successful – Raleigh made the marketing understatement of centuries to come: “I have known many who turned their gold into smoke, but you are the first to turn smoke into gold.”  We do not know to whom this was said; maybe he was standing in front of a mirror.

With a new century upon us, it was within its first decade that we saw the advent of the first real competition to tobacco cigarettes since Raleigh lit up: the e-cigarette. And with the e-cigarette innovation, his marketable quote, and that by Tareyton, must be re-visited. Finally, now there are very real benefits to stop fighting the urge to quit smoking, because that activity is now proven not only to be harmful, but fatal. So why fight? And why continue with the antithesis of Raleigh’s intent by continuing to turn gold into smoke?

Your Gold

Did you know that over 98 percent of your tobacco cigarette, for which you pay an average of $10 for a pack of 20 cigarettes, is burning up in smoke? You are literally pulling a $10 bill from your pocket, cutting off a small corner, too small to even know the denomination, retaining it and burning the rest to ashes and smoke. You may be doing this once a day (a full pack), which is over $3,600 per year. Keep in mind; if you earn the average U.S. income, then you’re burning over seven percent of it. Even if you just stuffed your mattress rather than burn it, in twenty years, you would have accumulated over $70,000. If invested wisely… well, you do the math according to your preferred investment strategy.  But tobacco smoking is making money for anyone but the smoker. Even if you quit by switching to e-cigarettes, you will still absorb a savings of about 80 cents on the dollar.  It’s a gold benefit.

Your Heart

Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States. While poor diet and exercise habits leading to obesity are its number one cause, number two is tobacco smoking. Often, the two causes are hand-in-hand because tobacco smoking is typically an exercise of leisure.

Heart disease will strike young and old alike. While it is an ailment affecting non-smokers, the smoking habit is known to cause and increase detrimental effects on the heart and circulatory system such that they lose efficiency and eventually stops functioning.

Your Lungs

Like heart disease, your lungs are susceptible to sometimes irreversible damage and disease by tobacco smoking over a lifetime. That lifetime is cut miserably short by the habit.  Tobacco smoking is the number one cause of lung disease; primarily lung cancer. This is a pity because simply quitting smoking, or never starting, is its number one cure.

The lungs are the most delicate tissue in the body because the primary function of lung tissue is to allow the oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange in the blood. In a healthy lung, this is accomplished with near miraculous ease in an environment that is clinically clean. Any contamination of the lung tissue is detrimental to this gas exchange, thus reducing the efficiency of blood to distribute necessary oxygen to the body and to extract toxic carbon dioxide from it. Tar from tobacco smoking is a thick, sticky residue that collects in the lung tissue, gradually reducing the efficiency of respiration.

Your Family

Secondhand smoke is the killer of over 42,000 people annually in the U.S. because the 98 percent of tobacco smoker’s end up exhaling toxin in the breathable air of others. Is it any wonder that smoking bans in public places are rigidly enforced? To consider the home as a refuge from the ban is a real threat to those whom smokers should love and respect most.

Your Environment

Cigarette butts litter our environment every year because some smokers (not all) are ignorant of ash trays. How often is a smoker in a vehicle ahead seen tossing out a lighted butt, embers scattering in the wind. The potential fire danger is real, but the litter is beyond potential; it is real each and every time. Annually, we clean up over 170 million tons of tobacco butts. This is an avoidable expense and an avoidable damage to the environment. By the way, the toxic materials that are harmful to human hearts and lungs are also, by contamination of waterways, harmful to animals.

If these do not define sufficient monetary, health and environmental benefits to quit smoking, then nothing will. But if you are convinced, know that modern technology has found an alternative, built upon the shoulders of giants, guaranteed to avoid a fight and guaranteed to eradicate all the above issues: quit and switch to an e-cigarette. One added benefit: no black eye.