Pandemic of modern society

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The name of this disease is smoking.

You find it funny? But the World Health Organization is no longer funny. Because tobacco is the second leading cause of death in the world. According to WHO statistics, diseases caused by tobacco smoking - heart attack, cancer, stroke - claim 5 million lives every year, among which one and a half million are women. More than 430,000 adults die every year from the effects of secondhand smoke, two-thirds of them are women.

Do you understand what this means? In fact, all smokers are not only suicides, but also murderers.… Assassins with a cigarette. They walk among us, they smoke among us. We, our children, breathe the smoke from their cigarettes, and pregnant women.

Most smokers become addicted to cigarettes during adolescence, when smoking causes irreversible genetic changes in the lungs and permanently increases the risk of lung cancer!

If the tobacco pandemic is not stopped, then already in 2030, tobacco and the effects of smoking will kill 10 million people annually … In the end, the cause of death of half of the people who smoke today (and there are about 650 million of them) will be tobacco.

In Russia the smoking situation is simply catastrophic: every third person smokes … More than 60% of men and more than 20% of women smoke. Among the population in between the ages of 19 and 44, about half of citizens smoke: that is, every second person in this age group is a smoker.

Not only many people smoke, they also smoke a lot: Russia is one of the seven leading countries in terms of smoking intensity:

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Normal 0 false false false RU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Map of countries by consumption of cigarettes per adult per year

Every day in our country more than 1000 people die from diseases associated with smoking - this is almost 400 thousand a year

But it is not enough for smokers in Russia to ruin their own health. When you walk down the street, take a closer look at the garbage under your feet: you will see that most of them are cigarette butts. Sidewalks, sandpits, lawns, bus stops are strewn with cigarette butts … Try, standing at a bus stop waiting for transport, to count the number of those who carry a cigarette butt to the trash can: it's good if there is one such "hero" for every 10 smokers.

However, streets and lawns covered with cigarette butts are not the worst thing. The worst thing is the devil-may-care attitude of smokers towards the people around them. From the point of view of a smoker, it's okay to smoke in a crowd, standing at a bus stop or at an intersection, waiting for the green light. They give little thought to the fact that when smoking while walking, they leave behind a nicotine plume, which gets people walking behind, sometimes pregnant women, children …

The addiction of cigarette killers is indulged by the owners of catering establishments: the vast majority of cafes and restaurants have so-called smoking areas inside, which are like a peeing corner in a pool. It has long been proven that there is no safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke … Even the most modern ventilation systems or separate smoking rooms cannot reduce indoor smoke exposure to levels deemed acceptable, they does not protect non-smokers from inhaling second-hand smoke … Only a 100% smoke-free environment can provide effective protection.

And it turns out that those who have chosen a healthy lifestyle for themselves, going into these cafes and restaurants, feel like second-class people: all comfortable conditions have been created for smokers (and the place is more comfortable, and hold an ashtray, my friend), and a non-smoker must endure and to sniff. And then go home and wash your clothes because they smelled right through and through of cigarettes. And also wash your hair thoroughly - hair absorbs smoke, like a sponge.

What to do? You can request a complaint book and describe the problem, remind you about the dangers of secondhand smoke. If every non-smoker does this, maybe the owners of the establishments will pay attention to the problem?

About 80% of the population suffers from secondhand smoke in our country. A significant part falls just on catering establishments.

The harm from secondhand smoke is colossal. There are about 4,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke; more than 50 of them are reliably carcinogenic (provoking the development of cancer). It increases the risk of heart disease and many respiratory diseases in non-smokers by 60%. Secondhand smoke in women can cause infertility: chemicals in cigarette smoke affect the hormones that regulate ovulation.

In our country, every second child is exposed to secondhand smoke. This is a terrible indicator: scientists have proven that tobacco smoke leads to sudden infant death syndrome, increases the risk of asthma, allergies, tuberculosis and other diseases. In addition, children who are passive smokers are potential bona fide smokers. They are twice as likely to start smoking as those whose parents do not smoke.

Smoking in Russian society has become commonplace - this is the real danger of this addiction. Murderers with cigarettes feel at ease, and their victims just silently endure all the bullying.

All measures to combat smoking, carried out in our country, are absolutely pointless, if only because they are all sponsored by … tobacco companies. For example, anti-tobacco propaganda among adolescents is built on the idea that cigarettes are presented as a product for adults (they say, if you grow up, then you can smoke).

And the fight against smoking should be based on one simple idea - that the smoker should be perceived by the next generations as a second-class person, as an outcast and a loser, whom there is no desire to imitate. This is the only way to save the younger generation from cigarettes: by introducing into the brain of a student that smoking is not just harmful, smoking is the lot of losers, it is for second-class people.

Moreover, it is necessary to make the smoker himself feel like a second-class person. Help from the authorities should not be expected: our government, occupied by the tobacco lobby, will certainly not do this. But we nonsmokers can do it. Just change your attitude towards smoking friends and acquaintances from condescending magnanimous to harsh rejection. Show them how disgusting and unpleasant their habit is to you.

Make remarks to smokers at stops (especially young mothers who have a cigarette in one hand and a one-year-old baby in the other), do not hesitate to publicly express your dissatisfaction, instill this rejection of smokers in your children. After all, if every five-year-old kid at the bus stop pokes a finger at the smoker and shouts “Mom, look, you are a drug addict!”, You see, after the tenth such kid, a tobacco addict will think about it …

In fact, it turned out that the masses of peasants, having experienced all the hardships of Soviet economic policy (the fight against wealthy peasants and private property, the creation of collective farms, etc.), flocked to the cities in search of a better life. This, in turn, created there an acute shortage of free real estate, which is so necessary for the placement of the main support of power - the proletariat.

It was the workers who became the bulk of the population, which from the end of 1932 began to actively issue passports. The peasantry (with rare exceptions) did not have the right to them (until 1974!).

Along with the introduction of the passport system in large cities of the country, a cleanup was carried out from "illegal immigrants" who did not have documents, and therefore the right to be there. In addition to the peasants, all kinds of "anti-Soviet" and "declassed elements" were detained. These included speculators, vagabonds, beggars, beggars, prostitutes, former priests and other categories of the population not engaged in socially useful labor. Their property (if any) was requisitioned, and they themselves were sent to special settlements in Siberia, where they could work for the good of the state.

The country's leadership believed that it was killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it cleans the cities of alien and hostile elements, on the other hand, it populates the almost deserted Siberia.

The police officers and the OGPU state security service carried out passport raids so zealously that, without ceremony, they detained on the street even those who received passports, but did not have them in their hands at the time of the check. Among the "violators" could be a student on his way to visit relatives, or a bus driver who left home for cigarettes. Even the head of one of the Moscow police departments and both sons of the prosecutor of the city of Tomsk were arrested. The father managed to quickly rescue them, but not all of those taken by mistake had high-ranking relatives.

The "violators of the passport regime" were not satisfied with thorough checks. Almost immediately they were found guilty and prepared to be sent to labor settlements in the east of the country. A special tragedy of the situation was added by the fact that recidivist criminals who were subject to deportation in connection with the unloading of places of detention in the European part of the USSR were also sent to Siberia.

Death Isle

The sad story of one of the first parties of these forced migrants, known as the Nazinskaya tragedy, has become widely known.

More than six thousand people were disembarked in May 1933 from barges on a small deserted island on the Ob River near the village of Nazino in Siberia. It was supposed to become their temporary refuge while the issues with their new permanent residence in special settlements were being resolved, since they were not ready to accept such a large number of repressed.

The people were dressed in what the police had detained them in on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). They did not have bedding or any tools to make a temporary home for themselves.

On the second day, the wind picked up, and then frost hit, which was soon replaced by rain. Defenseless against the vagaries of nature, the repressed could only sit in front of fires or wander around the island in search of bark and moss - no one took care of food for them. Only on the fourth day they were brought rye flour, which was distributed at several hundred grams per person. Having received these crumbs, people ran to the river, where they made flour in hats, footcloths, jackets and trousers in order to quickly eat this semblance of porridge.

The number of deaths among the special settlers was rapidly going into the hundreds. Hungry and frozen, they either fell asleep right by the fires and burned alive, or died of exhaustion. The number of victims also increased due to the brutality of some of the guards, who beat people with rifle butts. It was impossible to escape from the "island of death" - it was surrounded by machine-gun crews, who immediately shot those who tried.

Isle of Cannibals

The first cases of cannibalism on Nazinsky Island occurred already on the tenth day of the stay of the repressed there. The criminals who were among them crossed the line. Accustomed to surviving in harsh conditions, they formed gangs that terrorized the rest.

Residents of a nearby village became unwitting witnesses to the nightmare that was happening on the island. One peasant woman, who at that time was only thirteen years old, recalled how a beautiful young girl was courted by one of the guards: “When he left, people grabbed the girl, tied her to a tree and stabbed her to death, having eaten everything they could. They were hungry and hungry. Throughout the island, human flesh could be seen ripped, cut, and hung from trees. The meadows were littered with corpses."

"I chose those who are no longer alive, but not yet dead," a certain Uglov, accused of cannibalism, testified later during interrogations: So it will be easier for him to die … Now, right away, not to suffer for another two or three days."

Another resident of the village of Nazino, Theophila Bylina, recalled: “The deportees came to our apartment. Once an old woman from Death-Island also visited us. They drove her by stage … I saw that the old woman's calves were cut off on her legs. To my question, she replied: "It was cut off and fried for me on Death-Island." All the flesh on the calf was cut off. The legs were freezing from this, and the woman wrapped them in rags. She moved on her own. She looked old, but in reality she was in her early 40s."

A month later, hungry, sick and exhausted people, interrupted by rare tiny food rations, were evacuated from the island. However, the disasters for them did not end there. They continued to die in unprepared cold and damp barracks of Siberian special settlements, receiving a meager food there. In total, for the entire time of the long journey, out of six thousand people, just over two thousand survived.

Classified tragedy

No one outside the region would have known about the tragedy that had happened if it had not been for the initiative of Vasily Velichko, instructor of the Narym District Party Committee. He was sent to one of the special labor settlements in July 1933 to report on how the "declassed elements" are being successfully re-educated, but instead he completely immersed himself in the investigation of what had happened.

Based on the testimony of dozens of survivors, Velichko sent his detailed report to the Kremlin, where he provoked a violent reaction. A special commission that arrived in Nazino conducted a thorough investigation, finding 31 mass graves on the island with 50-70 corpses in each.

More than 80 special settlers and guards were brought to trial. 23 of them were sentenced to capital punishment for "looting and beating", 11 people were shot for cannibalism.

After the end of the investigation, the circumstances of the case were classified, as was the report of Vasily Velichko. He was removed from his position as instructor, but no further sanctions were taken against him. Having become a war correspondent, he went through the entire Second World War and wrote several novels about the socialist transformations in Siberia, but he never dared to write about the "island of death".

The general public learned about the Nazin tragedy only in the late 1980s, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union.