An experience that I do not recall others mentioning:
I tried out smoking cigarettes as a teen, surreptitiously, over a period of days and to the extent of perhaps half a pack, and experienced no effect (pleasurable or otherwise). The smoke had a taste in my mouth and nose, not noticeably pleasant or unbearably unpleasant; otherwise smoking did not do anything for me. In particular, I did not feel stimulated. So I stopped the experiment and did not start smoking.
Has anyone of you had an experience on these lines?
Sure, I also tried it as a young teen or tween. My father smoked so there were cigarettes around. I tried one cigarette, inhaled, and it made me feel quite ill for what seemed like hours but probably wasn’t that long. I’m glad for that reaction, I never felt the urge to try it again.
Later as a young adult I affected a pipe for a while, and occasionally a cigar, but I didn’t inhale those (I don’t think one is supposed to) so it didn’t make me sick. I could make myself feel a little light-headed if I smoked more than, say, one pipeful every couple of hours. But I wasn’t very dedicated to it, and stopped after a few years.
When I was a teenager in the 90s I would smoke occasionally with friends to look cool (no, to be cool). After months of this, while outside bumming one from a friend, I commented that they didn’t really make me feel anything at all.
“Well yeah, because you’re not inhaling.”
“What do you mean? Smoke’s going in, the cherry gets bright, I exhale a cloud.”
So he had me pull in a drag and hold it, then said, “OK, now pull it down” and demonstrated opening up your diaphragm as one does.
So I did. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. The wave of stimulation, yes, but also that I’d been visibly “fake” smoking for months and my friends were too polite to tell me.
That one drag made me feel like shit for the rest of the night. Stupidly, I didn’t learn my lesson and kept trying, wondering when it would start to feel fun and not make me want to vomit. “If I can only get addicted,” I thought. The idiocy of youth.
Fortunately I never did get addicted, and I learned to pull down just enough to get a little buzz without the nausea. I still smoke maybe 1 or 2 cigarettes a year for the nostalgia, but I have to be very careful.
I smoked cigarettes when I was younger. They did taste good. Smoke was neither a solid (like food), nor a liquid (like a drink), it was a whole 'nother taste sensation.
You are not meant to inhale a cigar or a pipe. You just enjoy the flavour.
If you inhale a cigar, you won’t be finding the nicotine kick that cigarettes give. Premium cigar blenders age the tobacco in such a way that as little nicotine (what makes tobacco smoke bitter-tasting and nasty-smelling) as possible makes it through to the final cigar. The result is, or should be, a very pleasant, tasty smoke that you only enjoy by taste. My ex-wife never complained if I enjoyed a premium handrolled Cuban in the house.
Same for pipe tobacco, only bitterness (hence, curing for nicotine) is commonly wanted, so some pipe tobaccos have a helluva lot of nicotine. But no pipe smoker would inhale them; again, it is only for the taste. I smoke a pipe too, and while there is a helluva lot of bitter nicotine in a blend containing Latakia tobacco, it can be very tasty when tempered by sweet golden Virginia. The best I can compare it to is this: Think a grapefruit half covered in sugar; you get the flavours of both. But while you eat the grapefruit, you still don’t inhale the tobacco smoke—you just enjoy the flavour of the bitter and sweet.
But nobody starts with premium handrolled cigars or blended pipe tobaccos. I moved onto them because I was curious about what else there could be. They were a damn sight more flavourful than cigarettes, so I left cigarettes, and here I am.
Same here. That is, trying it and not seeing the point to it. One night as a callow teenager,I was at a party with a bunch of coworkers from the restaurant where I washed dishes. A couple of drinks in, I decided on impulse to try it. Bummed a cigarette from someone and smoked it. Nothing. Tried a second one. Nothing. Next day, sore throat. My verdict: Screw this shit. Haven’t had the slightest urge to revisit it since.
I started because I liked the brief high, at age about 18 and quit permanently at age 21 after two failed attempts.
One of those was giving myself what very much felt like nicotine poisoning after chainsmoking through the come-down of a big LSD trip. Surprising that did not last..
What worked, was just one morning I woke up and decided, time to quit. And so I did.
I was around 16 when I gave cigarettes a go, my motivation being to be cool. I smoked maybe 20 cigarettes over the course of a month (Kools, as I recall). a pack of smokes was 45 cents and easily available via a vending machine, the kind with the handle you pull.
Despite both my parents having been heavy smokers, I never came close to the feeling of needing a cigarette, something I’ve been thankful for my entire adult life.
My dad was a heavy smoker when I was a kid, even in the bathroom, which made my toothbrush taste of cigarettes. He quit and restarted several times till he finally gave it up when I was in high school. I knew it was a nasty habit, but still…
I tried a couple of times over the years. First when I was babysitting at the house of a smoker. Of all things, it made my eyes feel weird. Then some years later when I was in college I tried again, and I was equally unimpressed. The taste, the smell, the whole experience. Never again.
The totally illogical part to me - you hear on the news of people in fires dying of smoke inhalation, yet smokers do it deliberately all the time. Yeah, I know, not the same thing. But I was thrilled when my workplace banned smoking indoors. If I could survive the gauntlet of smokers at the entrance, I was good.
I never even considered smoking cigarettes, because inhaling second-hand smoke gave me a headache.
But I didn’t have that problem with pipe tobacco, which smelled kind of nice and had no obvious headache problem. Of course, by the time I was in grad school I knew about the health risks. But I was in a play where I played a pipe-smoking character, so thought I’d give it a try – in the interests of verisimilitude, of course.
But it turned out that actually drawing on the pipe, sucking down the smoke through the pipestem, was a seriously disappointing experience. It was hot and bitter and stung. And it didn’t taste at all the way the smoke smelled. I can now understand why people smoke through hookahs and bongs – it cools that hot and burning smoke. But it probably doesn’t fix that bitter tang.
For the rest of the play, I simply carried a burning pipe in my mouth and didn’t try to smoke it.
Yeah, when I was a little kid, I stole one of my mom’s Kents and tried smoking it behind the garage. It was nasty and hot and bitter and made my mouth taste awful afterwards. That was the end of my smoking adventure. And my mom stopped smoking very soon after that, when the 1964 surgeon general’s report came out linking smoking to lung cancer. My dad, however, continued to smoke for the rest of his life, which ended in 1980 with a heart attack, no doubt thanks to Marlboros.
I’ve smoked a handful of cigarettes in my life, mostly as a teen/young adult for the cool factor. I’ve also smoked a handful of cigars (puffed, not inhaled). I had a pipe for years and went through a couple packs of pipe tobacco. I stopped the pipe when the novelty wore off and stuck it in a box up in my bedroom where it lay forgotten for years, but one day my teen son discovered my briar pipe and apparently decided to would be a great thing to smoke pot in. I was never able to PROVE it was him but will just note that I discovered one day the pipe had migrated from the box it was being stored in to a hiding place inside a tightly wrapped plastic bag under a rock behind a bush in the side yard. He, of course, had no idea how it got there. Must have been awful being mistrusted and wrongfully accused by one’s parents like that.
The Summer I was 17 I was dating a girl who smoked, so I decided I might as well become a smoker too. I made myself smoke several cigs a day, as if I was forcing myself to take medicine. It got so it made my tongue hurt after several cigs in a day. What a moron I was back then, trying to get myself addicted to cigarettes
Fortunately, the addiction never took, and I mostly stopped smoking after we broke up at the end of that Summer. I did continue to bum a cig or two off friends when I was out drinking, since the little nicotine kick was a nice counterpoint to an alcohol buzz. I finally said to myself “why am I smoking at all? The ratio of ‘effect it gives you’ vs. ‘how bad it is for you’ is way off”. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in maybe 30ish years.
It is funny - what makes some people take to smoking and others not. Is it just a habit that develops? An addictive personality? A DESIRE to smoke? Similarly, many folk - myself included - did not fall in love with their first sip of beer or hard liquor. I wish I had simply said, “Not for me” instead of workin ghard at developing a taste for it. But I sure did enjoy being drunk…
I started smoking cigs as a college freshman. At the time, I was smoking a lot of pot and drinking quite a bit. Early on I smoked menthols. Don’t really recall how much I smoked in sophomore-junior year, but by senior year I was working in a liquor store (where I got cigs dirt cheap) and smoking 2+ ppd of Marlboro lights. Pretty much went along with drinking. You’ve got 2 hands - a beer in one and a cig in the other.
I smoked three cigarettes when I was 16, because I wasn’t supposed to.
I don’t remember feeling like they were having any particular effect on me; certainly there was no obvious rush. But there was something about that third one that made me think that if I had a fourth I wouldn’t be able to stop.
So I never smoked the fourth one. I’ve been grateful ever since to my sixteen year old self.
I read somewhere years later — sorry, no idea where — that for a lot of people who got badly addicted it only took three or four cigarettes.
ETA: I smoked quite a bit of pot in my late teens and twenties. I never had any problem stopping that, either for a couple of weeks or months to visit my parents or when I eventually just got tired of it and the frequency dropped to maybe a couple of times a year or less. Now that it’s legal I still only rarely want to.
Tried cigarettes, didn’t see the point, ended up smoking for 15 years anyway. That’s addiction for you!
I don’t think it happened after 3-4 cigarettes. It was just a thing to do with friends, over a period of months or maybe a year. One day I decided it was dumb and a waste of money and should I probably quit, and found that I couldn’t. Then years later the twins were born, leaving me a strong incentive to quit, and basically no time to smoke, so I was done.
Genetics plays a large part. There are differences in nicotinic receptors and other things in the brain. I’m not up to date on the latest molecular research, so I can’t go into details.
I remember walking home from kindergarten, and seeing the common site of cigarette butts on the ground. I knew that people smoked them, so I picked one up and put in my mouth. I didn’t understand what the attraction was, so I never tried again.
That is exactly what happened to me. My stepsister taught me to inhale, I choked and coughed for half an hour, and then I was cool for many years. A cool moron.
Never tried cigarettes. My mother was a smoker (she quit when I was in my teens). I once asked her what they tasted like. She said “like burning leaves.” I lost any desire to try them.
I did smoke a pipe for a few months, and have tried cigars, but I dropped them.
My stepsister taught me to inhale, I choked and coughed for half an hour, and then I was cool for many years. A cool moron.