SeniorBeef, quite a number of people get hooked after their first few cigarettes.
Either you will or you won’t. If you do, you’re fucked.
Imagine your mother drowning slowly, for days while you’re watching her gasp for air. Jesus. How clear do I have to be?
SeniorBeef, may I suggest something a little less destructive to do with your spare time? Much cooler, too.
Peace,
mangeorge
Nicotine is one of strongest, most addictive substances we know of. Ciggies only contain a tiny, tiny amount of nicotine. Much more, and no human being would be able to tolerate even one cig.
The answer to your question is that after just one cigarette, the nicotine will have begun it’s work of interfering with your body’s receptors (in the kidneys and the brain) and their natural function of detecting, and trying to reject, impurities in your blood. However, the first 1 or 2 cigarettes are also likely to make you feel at least a little unwell. After 3 or 4, your body’s natural detection/elimination response will have been sufficiently damaged by the nictoine for the ‘sickness’ to pass away or be ignored (for the most part) and for the lowering of blood nicotine levels to be considered a problem to be remedied by lighting up. again. Thus is the physical addiction started.
However, cigarette smoking is far more than just a physical addiction. There is also the emotional and behavioural\habitual addiction. These can be just as hard to break as the physical addiction.
Although you may not take any notice, I join with the others here who beg you not to try this experiment, no matter how curious you may be, no matter how well-intentioned your motives. I’ve fought the good fight with cigarettes, and I did manage to quit, but it was one of the hardest, toughest things I’ve ever done. Please, please, please reconsider, I beg you. If you just knew one fraction of what I (and many others) know about the horrors this highly addictive substance can lead to, and the sheer hell of trying to quit, you’d drop this project in a trice.
I do admire your desire to help your friend quit. This is not the way to do it.
There’s no need to start smoking if all you want to do is get addicted to nicotine. They make nicotene transdermal patches in 7, 14, and 21 mg strengths. That’s enough to sooth many addicts. The gum, 2-4 mg, is also pretty addictive.
Why is everyone so against nicotine addiction? That is so un-American. Allow me to do my patriotic duty and encourage our dear OP to GO FOR IT, MAN! Cigarettes are one of the most heavily taxed products, and the dwindling number of smokers has cut deep into tobacco tariffs necessary to pay for education, national security, and other social programs. Even if you only smoke for a few months, you will have done your part to keep our market economy afloat! Especially in these hard times.
Don’t let the terrorists win, man. 
It’s very individual. I probably smoked for over a year before I really felt addicted. Then one day I decided to stop, just for kicks. And I stopped for a year. No withdrawal. No cravings. Nada. It wasn’t even a conscious decicision. I just didn’t feel like smoking.Then I decided to pick it up again, Lord knows for what reason. It passes the time I guess and gives me something to do. Lame excuses, but that is what they are.
Now I’ve been smoking for a good 5-6 years, about a pack a day. But there are times when I just don’t smoke for a week or two at a time, and I don’t get jittery or nervous or have these nicotine fits everyone talks about. Once again, it’s never a conscious decision. I’ve never bothered trying to quit and have no desire to at the moment. Once I do decide, I’m sure I’ll go through with it.
Addiction is very subjective. I certainly am addicted, but I feel like it’s manageable. I don’t go crazy if I go a week without smokes, or if I can’t smoke on flights. Heck, I always reserve non-smoking sections of trains and sometimes restaurants, cuz they’re generally more pleasant. But put me in a bar or a long walk across the city and I need a smoke just to have something to do. It doesn’t really make me feel much of anything. I don’t feel “good” after having a cigarette. I don’t feel bad, either.
So, as everyone else was saying, it may take you a couple packs, it may take you a couple years to be fully addicted.
Don’t do it. Nicotine is SOOOOO hard to give up.
Take it from cough one who knows splutter only too well.
If you absolutely must (you idiot), then use patches or gum (you dumbass).
NEVER EVER SMOKE.
SenorBeef, I am begging you not to take such a chance with your health.
I smoked for 15 years, and it shattered my health. I’m almost 6 months clear now, and I’m slowly reclaiming my health but it’s hard work.
It’s an utterly evil pernicious drug that has ruined many millions of lives. It doesn’t even make you feel good; all smoking a cigarette does is restore the state of mind which a non-smoker feels all the time. In short, it’s an expensive, dangerous nasty con.
To answer the OP: I smoked for years before becomming addicted. I would smoke socially, when drinking or with others who smoke. But I never had cravings and could go days w/o cigs. I thought the whole addiction thing was exagerated by everyone. Then one day, I was addicted.
I now have friends who haven’t smoked for that long (couple of years or less) and they are in the same boat I used to be in. They claim they are addicted, but can go long periods of time w/o smokes to hide it from SO’s or what have you. I try to warn them that when the real addiction hits, they won’t be able to go a few hours w/o physical problems from withdrawal, but they don’t listen.
Oh, BTW: I quit about 7 months ago. Used the patch for about a week. To build up to quit date I stopped smoking in my Condo, then my car, over a period of a couple of years to break routines.
[hijack]
According to this (it’s probably worthy of a whole 'nother thread), artificial lungs will have been invented by 2015.
I just hope I make it that long cough hack wheeze
[/hijack]
DO NOT START SMOKING If I had actually listened to all the people who told me that… Just to give you an idea YOU WILL NEVER GET OVER THE ADDICTION I quit once for 5 solid years. Only problem is that if you see someone with a cigarette you want one bad. I mean right now just typing about them I want one. I don’t believe in making them illegal or taxing the hell out of them, I just believe in getting people to never pick them up. And no matter what anyone tells you, YOU ALWAYS GO BACK it just takes the right amount of stress or a traumatic time in your life to get the ball rolling again…
For your own sake don’t do it.
Ok, I’ll not do it. Thanks for the info/advice.
Actually - in a related question - I have smoked cigars for about 2 years, occasionally (maybe 3-5 a month), but I never inhale the smoke - and if I do accidentally, it still makes me almost puke. In any case, I think I read once that nicotine can be absorbed through the mouth - is that true? If so, to what extent?
Btw, I’ve never felt any sort of cravings whatsoever for cigars, so there’s no way I’m addicted this way.
From pulykamell;
Now where have I heard that before. 
I’ve smoked for about forty years. I, too, have quit. Many times. I don’t smoke in my car, in other people’s homes, around kids, and sometimes I don’t smoke for hours on general principal. No problem.
But I can’t QUIT. I’m sitting here smoking as I type this. I don’t want to die, but I am. Not now, but sooner than I should.
What a :wally, huh?
Oh yeah, and then there’s the guilt. I can’t help but feel that when young people see me smoking, it somehow encourages them to smoke. I wish they could see inside my body. Real cool.
There. Now you’ve had “The Speech”.
But I’m afraid I’m wasting my breath here. What little I have left.
Peace,
mangeorge
How addictive are they?
I quit 11 years ago, on my 21st B-Day. If they invented a way to “cure” all the damage it does to your body, I would immediately start smoking again. I think about wanting a cigarette every day. After a meal, after a bad commute home, on vacation, drinking wine, when my wife occasionally has one (grrr!!!)… Every day, and I stopped eleven years ago.
That’s how addictive they are.