IELTS essay about the tobacco menace
Essay topic
Tobacco mainly in the form of cigarettes is one of the most widely used drugs in the world. Over a billion adults legally smoke tobacco every day. The long term health costs are high – for smokers themselves, and for the wider community in terms of health care costs and lost productivity. Do governments have a legitimate role to protect citizens from the harmful effects of their own decisions to smoke, or are such decisions up to the individual.
Sample essay
When an individual consumes 3 Cigarettes sticks per day and is diagnosed with Cancer who is to be blamed – the Government or the Individual? In my view both the individual as well as the Government are responsible for the Tobacco menace and only a joint effort can help curb the menace.
Government can play a pivotal role to raise awareness about the harmful effects of Tobacco on individual’s health. This can be done by displaying the ill-effects of Cigarettes on the packaging. In-addition, they can restrict supply of Tobacco thereby reducing the total available cigarettes for consumption. For example they can restrict the total area under cultivation for Leaf tobacco thereby reducing the total tobacco manufactured. Lastly they can levy heavy fines for consuming tobacco in public thereby not allowing people to spread the Cigarettes menace.
Although Government can take certain steps to reduce the menace it alone does not have the power to solve the problem. It is ultimately the individual who smokes a Cigarette who has to stop Cigarette consumption. The smoker has to understand the ill-effects of Cigarette addiction and ultimately decide to stop consuming cigarettes. If smoker does not understand the harmful effects then the menace would go on. It is ultimately the smoker who creates demand for such products and if he reduces the consumption then there would not be any demand for Cigarettes and obviously there would be no sale of such products in the market.
To conclude it is both, the Government and the individual who can ultimately work together to reduce and restrict the Tobacco consumption and stop the menace from spreading.
Analysis
Overall, this seems to be a band 7.5 essay.
