<p>Teenagers think they are immune from disease and aging and addiction. “Oh, that won’t happen to me!”</p>
<p>Also, it has a “bad boy” or “bad girl” image which appeals to teens during the rebellious years.</p>
<p>The cigarette companies pay for all those colorful “born before date” signs at every checkout counter in America. Why? From the moment they can read, kids get the message that smoking is a sign of being “grown up”. Nobody decides to become a nicotine junkie. They decide (usually as a teen) so just try one. Or maybe just one pack. Which would be fine if the darn drug weren’t so crazy addictive.</p>
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<p>I agree with this 100%. My mother was/is a chain smoker, and none of her kids ever smoked… what an awful habit. Sometimes it still makes me a little sad to think how my whole childhood smelled like second-hand smoke - and how I smelled like second-hand smoke until I was 18.</p>
<p>Go by Memorial Sloan Kettering in NYC (Cancer hospital). You can see the poor wretches smokiing outside, some with IV poles. NY has some strict anti smoking laws and yet a lot of smoking going on.</p>
<p>Ashamed here to admit that my kids have smoked a little, which disgusts me, even the D with severe allergies. They think (or thought, till I gave a piece of my mind) a rare cigarette is ok. They’ve lived overseas where there is a lot more smoking in public places. And then there is the hooka culture, which is a stylish form of smoking, but tobacco just the same.</p>
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<p>actually, I love the smell of secondhand smoke :o I just stay away from it since I know it’s bad</p>
<p>I believe that some young women smoke as a way to control their weight.</p>
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<p>This is not necessarily a bad thing.</p>
<p>Most of the health damage from smoking is caused by components of tobacco other than nicotine. But it’s nicotine that makes tobacco addictive. If you can’t break the nicotine habit completely, chewing nicotine gum is a far better way to deal with your addiction than smoking.</p>
<p>My mom smoked up to the day she died. Had to take her oxygen cannula out to do so. Died of a lung condition at age 66 after 50 years of smoking.</p>
<p>I couldn’t imagine trying to quit smoking and be President at the same time.</p>
<p>My grandma died when I was three of lung cancer. She was 61 at the time. </p>
<p>You would think losing her mom at such an incredibly young age would deter my mom from smoking. </p>
<p>Nope.</p>
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<p>Sounds good in theory. But, the nicotine gum is then preventing you from breaking free from the drug addiction. That means that you continue the constant withdrawal cycles, every morning, and then every hour or two throughout the day. To not smoke, while actively addicted to the drug, is torture. Using the nicotine gum reduces the odds that you will permanently quit smoking.</p>
<p>Stop using the drug. It’s completely out of your system in a few days and the physical craving is completely gone in a few months. A year or two down the road and it no longer requires any willpower whatsoever to not smoke.</p>
<p>The studies of nicotine gum and patches aren’t realistic. They take a group of nicotine junkies and give them a patch or gum that the smokers expect will ease their withdrawal. Under those expectations, of course the people getting the drug experience less withdrawal than those getting the fake drug. But, that’s a completely difference comparison than looking at people who accept that they are nicotine drug addicts and make the decision to stop using the drug. The whole idea of nicotine replacement undermines what had been fairly successful. For example, group support has proven to be very helpful in kicking the addiction. Now you can’t even find a group support program because all those funds go to buy nicotine gum and patches to give away. The amount of money going to pharma for each successful quitter is insane. It’s not working. The quit rates should be better today than they were 30 years ago, not worse.</p>
<p>My parents have both been smoking since they were teens, and it is disgusting. My father has tried to quit and usually lasts 6 months to a year before something happens and he caves. I can’t imagine paying that much to slowly kill myself. It honestly sometimes makes me mad to think of the times I have gone without things while my parents were spending probably at least $30-40 per week on their habit. </p>
<p>My mother is one of those “pry my cigarette out of my cold, dead hands” kind of people. I honestly think that the only thing that will get her to quit is being diagnosed with cancer (which worked for my grandmother when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in her late 50s). </p>
<p>That being said, as much as seeing them smoking convinced me that I didn’t want to smoke, one of my siblings is a smoker. She’s also generally the one of the four of us who is the risk taker, makes poor decisions in general. So I wonder if it’s just a matter of the fact that there will always be that subset of people who will do what they know they’re not supposed to even if they know the health ramifications. Some people just don’t seem to have the capacity to think about the long-term consequences of their actions. They just aren’t wired that way.</p>
<p>My father smoked three packs a day. He died from complications of oral cancer and chronic bronchitis at 47. I was 14. I hate, hate, hate cigarettes–I never got to have an adult relationship with him, and my H and kids never met him.</p>
<p>However–my sister, who was 12 at the time, smokes. God help me, I’ll never understand why. And she’s developing a persistent cough. So maddening!</p>
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<p>She got caught in the trap. The reality is that the very first puff she took set off a chain of events to led to her becoming a lifelong nicotine junkie, smoking all day, every day, for the rest of her life. If she had believed that could happen, she probably never would have taken the first puff. The addiction and the constant behavior reinforcement of the addicition results in a litany of rationalizations (“junkie lies”) not to quit.</p>
<p>[Allen</a> Carr: Nobody decides to become a smoker](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=AgvkSoYGeS4#t=128s]Allen”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=AgvkSoYGeS4#t=128s)</p>
<p>It is interesting, someone posted that being in a household where no one smokes may lead them to curiousity in trying it, and that makes sense. However, statistics used to be that if 1 parent smoked a kid was about 25% likely to smoke, if both it was about 50%. My mom smoked like a chimney, and I am pretty certain my problems with my sinuses were due to that (my dad smoked a pipe for years, then quit). I never was tempted, I was in the school of finding it foul, especially once I left home and wasn’t around it. </p>
<p>I think there is still this association with smoking being cool that flies in the face of all the warnings, all the negative perceptions around smoking that have happened in roughly the past 30 years. When I first started working in the mid 80’s, smoking was still common in many public spaces, in stores, in malls, of course in restaurants and bars, and work places, including the office I worked in in NYC. Now, after all the restrictions, it shocks me to think of how common it once was, that it wasn’t long ago that 50% of adults smoked. Unfortunately, there is a counter culture with the young, always has been, and it isn’t helped that young celebrities are a lot more likely to smoke then the general population, and that helps influence things, too. Plus tobacco advertising in magazines and such is still prevalent, and that has major impact as well (personally, I think all advertising of tobacco products should be banned). What is scary is that a lot of young people are using chewing tobacco and such, and that is as bad or worse then smoking is. </p>
<p>I also think it is related to high stress jobs, my experience with traders and investment bankers and brokers in the financial industry is that a lot more of them smoke then I would have expected, in general smoking tends to be more common in people with less education/lower economic strata then in the higher ones, but these are kids, many of whom have degrees from prestigious universities, where smoking is I suspect higher then the general rate. </p>
<p>There is another factor, there are old axioms that the first 90% of any activity is often a lot easier then the last 10%. and maybe that is at work. We also have a bifurcated government, we have the federal health agencies pushing hard against smoking and tobacco products, and yet we have our wonderful subsidy system that helps subsidize tobacco farmers and the tobacco industry, it makes no sense. Governments also tax tobacco heavily, and make a lot of money off the tax revenue, so they have incentive not to crimp it too much. </p>
<p>Still, the changes in a generation are staggering, and it blows my mind when I see how entrenched smoking is in other quarters, in places in Europe, for example (I thought Ireland would fall into civil war when they banned smoking in pubs, and I was in England just before their ban went into effect, and people were ****ed, and if the French ever tried to ban smoking the way other countries have, in public places, they really would be in for it…:). I sometimes worry that my son, who wants to go into music as a profession (classical). might end up picking up the habit due to the heavy concentrations of students and musicians from overseas, especially with kids from Asia and Russia where smoking is very,very common…hopefully he will have enough sense not to.</p>
<p>Quote from a scene of Star Trek Deep Space 9 “Little Green Men”, where three Ferengi (Star Trek aliens) accidentally time travel to late 1940s Earth, landing in Roswell, NM to be “studied” by curious humans, who happen to be smoking in front of them:</p>
<p>[Little</a> Green Men (TV episode 1995) - Quotes - IMDb](<a href=“"Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" Little Green Men (TV Episode 1995) - Quotes - IMDb”>"Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" Little Green Men (TV Episode 1995) - Quotes - IMDb)</p>
<p>A lot, if not most kids are going to try it. Some will smoke occaisonally or even a lot for while and quit. Some will get hooked. My mother has COPD and my MIL’s brother, my children’s much beloved great uncle is on full oxygen and dying of COPD, both smokers for many years. My family has a lot of cancer. Still my older ones couldn’t stay away, and I’m sure that they’ve used and abused other things too. Now, they seem to be off the stuff, at least, i don’t detect it and cigarette smoking is something one can’t easily hide from me because my nose is very sensitive to that smell. A problem they have had is that their clothes sometimes have the odor because sadly, a lot of people they know do smoke, and heavily. Some of my friends do too, and I have to strip off my clothes immediately after spending any time with them.</p>
<p>My parents both smoked; my father was a heavy smoker, of the unfiltered type. </p>
<p>I can remember taking long car trips with my dad puffing away the whole time. No seat belts, of course.</p>
<p>My dad died from lung cancer shortly before his 76th birthday, 10 years after he quit smoking.</p>
<p>I tried smoking, especially when out drinking as a teenager/young adult. I never developed a habit.</p>
<p>My first husband smoked. </p>
<p>Not being around smokers for many years, I find myself extremely sensitized to second hand smoke. If someone is smoking 10 feet away, I find it unbearable. I can tell when DH has been somewhere where there’s been smoking, he’ll come home reeking of it.</p>
<p>My younger sister smokes occasionally, none of the rest of us do. My father smoked for years but my mom said he had to quit or she would leave, and thankfully he did because I have horrible asthma and am especially allergic to cigarettes and I can only imagine what secondhand smoke would have done to me. I used to have to medicate myself to visit a friend whose parents smoked, and I couldn’t go to smokey restaurants or bowling alleys until the smoking ban passed here. I’m not friends with anyone who smokes anymore… it’s not like I think they’re bad people but it just makes me so literally sick and it isn’t worth it.</p>
<p>In my sister’s case, I think she is looking for ways to be self-destructive. When she was a pre-teen, she cut herself on purpose. Now she smokes. When I think of how many of my friends were into the cutting thing once-- how many young people get that self-destructive urge at some point in their lives, it doesn’t surprise me how many get hooked on smoking. People make dumb choices when they’re young and dumb and think they don’t care about what happens to them, and sometimes those choices are addictive.</p>
<p>My best friends parents smoked when we were growing up, and her father died a very horrific death from complications from throat cancer, in front of his wife and children. One of those children grew up to be intensely anti-smoke, but the other one did take up smoking. The other one engages in a lot of self-destructive behavior. I don’t think he cares.</p>
<p>" A problem they have had is that their clothes sometimes have the odor because sadly, a lot of people they know do smoke, and heavily. Some of my friends do too, and I have to strip off my clothes immediately after spending any time with them. "</p>
<p>One of the biggest causative factor in smoking is peers, and if people are around those who smoke, they tend to. My mom said she started smoking, not as a teen as many people do, but as a young adult, when she would be out on dates with other couples and it was what they were doing. …</p>
<p>It is funny, one of the things that all the people I know who are ex smokers say, when they smell second hand smoke or for example, someone sits next to them on the bus or train who had been smoking before they got on, is how they never realized how bad it smelled. I can remember in my days of going to bars or clubs before the smoking ban in NYC (which according to the restaurant and bar association was going to put something like 30% of the bars and restaurants out of business, which of course ended up being a bit of a joke, the only places that went under were places in trouble before the ban…) and coming home, and peeling off my clothing, throwing it into the washer we had right away and throwing myself in the shower, it smelled so bad, I think these days I would rather have my clothing saturated with the smell of gasoline then the smell from people smoking around me. I think what a lot of smokers couldn’t understand was just how much their smoking affected others, that leaving out the health issues, just how badly it made everything smell. Quite honestly, I wish there was the political will to basically abolish tobacco once and for all. Unlike alcohol, where there are established benefits and also safe limits, there is no benefit to tobacco that can’t be achieved otherwise, and the negatives are so strong that they are outweighed. Prohibition was an idiotic answer to the very real issues of alcohol, but banning tobacco is more like banning compounds claiming to be ‘health’ drinks containing wonderful things like mercury in them, no benefit with a ton of harm. In reality, my real hope is that smoking eventually becomes about as socially acceptable as child porn, that few people would want the stigma of being associated with it.</p>