<p>“When I see people huddled outside in the rain smoking, my mental image is the standing in a circle injecting themselves with syringes. Same thing”</p>
<p>No, it’s worse. I don’t have to breathe anyone’s heroin. Shoot/snort away, as far as I’m concerned. But I have zero sympathy for people who smoke where I’m trying to breathe. Chew the gum and smoke when you get home if you must (windows shut).</p>
<p>All my friends in middle school started smoking and kept smoking. I never tried it. I was a weirdo in a lot of ways, many of them negative, but a positive aspect of my weirdness is that I was immune to this temptation. I’m still friends with the two I was closest to in seventh grade when everyone started. They’ve all quit – some after 5 years, some after 20.</p>
<p>The most effective strategy for cutting youth smoking is raising the price. A lot. The research shows direct drops in teen smoking for every dollar you raise the price of a pack.</p>
<p>Actually, nicotine is so additive that banning tobacco would result in an immediate black market with all of the problems that entails. It would be a much bigger market than the heroin market. In prisons where cigarettes are banned, they pay crazy amounts (like $10 for a cigarette) to get the drug they need. It’s a tough issue. Not a lot of simple answers.</p>
<p>One place to start would be getting cigarettes out of every convenience store in the country. Put it behind the counter in pharmacies. That’s would slow the influx of new teenage smokers. But, there’s no political will to reduce the availability of nicotine. It’s a huge business for the tobacco nicotine suppliers and the pharma nicotine suppliers who share the multi-billion dollar market.</p>
<p>DH and I and some of his college friends went to a club in his college town that they all remembered very fondly (I didn’t go to his alma mater). We were practically choking from the smoke (and we are not usually the type to make a big deal about people smoking around us), and our clothes and hair were just FOUL when we got back to our hotel. Taking a shower didn’t help-our hotel room stunk the next morning just from our clothes. Our luggage still stinks months later!</p>
<p>When we lived in a smoking world, we really didn’t notice it so much, but now that most places in Dallas are smoke free, I notice it immediately if even one person is smoking somewhere in my vicinity. It’s kind of weird how your sensitivity changes.</p>
<p>musicprnt, you’re pointing out why my D has tried smoking, though hopefully not recently. She’s spent a lot of time in France, and is playing in a community orchestra there now. Will have to ask her about this. </p>
<p>Despite growing up with my smoking dad and suffering the health consequences, it doesn’t bother me to be around smoking as much as some. But had I continued the contact, I’d probably be on the way to end of life by this point.</p>
<p>One of my childhood friends started smoking early and became addicted. She smoked for years, and then decided to stop when she had a high risk pregnancy. She had a terrible time, but succeeded and has been smoke free since. But, you know what she told me. She still craves. When she finishes a nice meal for instance, she wants a cigarette many times. When sititng alone some evenings, she so wants one. When she smells cigarette smoke somewhere, the desire rises in her. She’s never gotten over the desire, though she hasn’t touched a cigaretty in over 30 years. Breast cancer and chronic bronchitus have made it a priority for her to stay away from cigarets. But, oh, she still craves.</p>
<p>My father was a lot like your childhood friend, cptofthehouse – except that he never had a high-risk pregnancy!</p>
<p>What he did have was a case of pneumonia, for which he was hospitalized for more than a week when he was in his forties. Before that, he had smoked 3 packs a day, but he was not allowed to smoke in the hospital, and after he was discharged, he realized that he had already gotten through the worst of tobacco withdrawal, and he decided to quit for good.</p>
<p>But he never stopped craving tobacco, and he never stopped reaching into his pocket for the pack of cigarettes that was no longer there. He lived for another 40 years, but the desire to smoke never went away completely.</p>
<p>“And then there is the hooka culture, which is a stylish form of smoking, but tobacco just the same.”</p>
<p>Yep, get those LAC “we are so worldly and Multi-cultural” kiddos hooked as well.
Before you flame me for that coment, one of mine got trapped in this way for a year. It’s just as addictive when papaya flavored via a hooka at a cool restaurant. Kids laugh at the “drug” implication with a hookah, laugh aboutAlice in Wondrerland, etc. Never realizing that they are getting hooked on nicotine. Addiction pathways are made so much more easily when under 21-25.</p>
<p>My daughter, whom I believe would never touch a cigarette, brought a hookah back from Dubai to college. I told her to smoke pot in it, not tobacco. She gave me some song and dance about how the hookah removes the nicotine from the tobacco smoke. I sent her some Mayo clinic info on the nicotine levels in hookah smoke and told her that, if she smoked tobacco in the hookah and got herself addicted after giving me hell all those years for smoking, I would personally drive to her place and kick her butt…</p>
<p>I actually think I put the fear of god into her. Not the fear of me kicking her butt, but explaining to her what it’s like to live all day, every day, for the next smoke and, yes, maybe she wouldn’t get addicted, but is that a game of Russian roulette that you really want to play? For what? </p>
<p>I feel the same way about kids smoking cigars. Where’s the upside?</p>
<p>My S, in HS, the really smart one, the really talented one in band and jazz band always first chair, and theater, usually the lead, the math wiz, the cross country runner that never won, the " nerd". Accepted to and graduated from a top LAC (physics and math).</p>
<p>Because he took a puff that set a chain of events in motion and one day he woke up in drug withdrawal, needing a cigarette. Trapped. He probably wouldn’t even admit that he’s addicted to a drug. Of course, the simple answer to that one is, “OK. If you aren’t addicted to drug, then just quit…” </p>
<p>My advice to him would be simple and pragmatic. He’s either going to smoke until the day he dies or (more likely) he is going to wake up one day, say “enough is enough”, and quit smoking. Might as well make that day sooner rather than later. The real cost isn’t that smoking ultimately kills you, but rather that it steals your life away, slowly, day after day. I remember the time I tried to quit in college. Sure wish I could turn the clock back and take another stab at it. I sure didn’t know that it would take me 35 more years.</p>
<p>^^i thought about showing him your response Idad but decided not to because he might think he still had 30-35 more years to quit.</p>
<p>I think the biggest problem is that smokers do not usually see an immediate, other than coughing, result of their deadly habit. They think it will not happen to them. And, unfortunately, some think that they do not care if they die of smoking at 69 or so. They at least enjoyed it while they were alive.</p>
<p>My father use to say, " If I have to give up everything I enjoy, why continue living?". He died in his early 70’s. He had emphysema, but that is not what killed him ironically. It was other issues that may or may not have been related to smoking.</p>
<p>My father was a smoker, despite his parents being total teetotalers. My brother, heavily influenced by DARE type programs at school, begged him to quit. And he did. He often tells the story of going cold turkey, having his last cigarette at some NYE party in the late 1980s. He talks about what his first puff was like too, how the world blurred a bit and from that instant he was hooked. But for all his talk, I caught him smoking a cigarette on our back porch when I was ten. I don’t know if that was really just a one time thing, but it must have been pretty rare, as I saw him only that one time in my whole life. His brother, who never quit, is now suffering from cancer which has taken a good deal of his mobility and may take his life, so I doubt my father will go near cigarettes again.</p>
<p>I also caught my maternal grandmother sneaking a cigarette once. My mother would tell stories about having to go buy cigarettes for her as a kid, and about having to let her smoke in her apartment as a twenty-something even though she would never let a friend or boyfriend do the same. </p>
<p>But outside of these two incidents and old stories, I didn’t grow up around many smokers. The first kid I knew who smoked was a guy in my 10th grade English class. Most of the popular kids at my school regarded cigarettes as gross, and hookah and weed as fun. </p>
<p>In college, cigarettes and all manner of drugs are way more popular. Most of my friends who showed up as straight-laced no longer are. Another poster a few pages back gave thanks to her “weirdness,” which stopped social pressures from convincing her to smoke, and I have to credit the same. I’ll sit around doing homework or watching movies with friends doing… lots of things. I’ve been unable to call up the courage to try to convince any of my friends to stop with the cigarettes though, even the one who, before she started, complained about her mother’s addiction.</p>
<p>In our state, you can’t smoke within 20 feet of any public building that has a roof and a well, with a few exceptions. Our state has one of the lower rates of tobacco use in the state, but it continues to be a struggle to keep tobacco companies from getting people started and restarted on tobacco.</p>