My FIL was up to 4 packs a day til he died of lung cancer.
My parents smoked a lot when I was a kid, and during the cold Erie PA winters they’d both be smoking in the closed-up car, with me and my sister in the back seat. Unpleasant.
They both quit, thankfully.
My old boss, at my college work-study job, was easily 300+ pounds. He was a one-time college football lineman, who’d “gone to seed” – big Norwegian guy, 6’4", and very overweight. He was in his late 50s when I went to work for him, and smoked 4 packs a day, alternating between Lucky Strikes and unfiltered Camels. This was in the 1980s, when it was legal to smoke in an office, and his office just had a smoky miasma about it. Any paper which was in his office for any length of time turned yellow.
10 cigarettes an hour is doable, that translates to a pack every 2 hours. If one went without sleep one could theoretically smoke 12 packs a day, but take out 8 hours for sleep and perhaps another hour a day for eating, drinking, showering, and anything that needs to be done without a cigarette in one’s mouth, and one should be able to do over 7 packs (140 cigarettes) a day without having to smoke more than one at a time. Though I wonder about carbon monoxide levels…
Me.
I started smoking very late (22 y/o I think?) But I apparently was trying to make up for lost time.
For a couple of years I worked in jobs where I could smoke and work. The year I smoked the most, I worked in a foundry where it was pretty easy to keep a cigarette going much of the time. I was also freshly in divorced bachelor mode, so after work I would go out or stay in a crack a beer and smoke constantly until I went to bed.
So I smoked at least 2 packs a day on an average day, if I had a little to drink after work I would add on at least another pack to that.
Fortunately I was able to quit several years ago.
Three packs a day by a former housemate. He later got a severe bacterial lung infection, no doubt in part due to the damage he’d done to his lungs. Nearly died in the hospital; hopefully he’s quit!
My Grandfather smoked 4+ packs a day. Smoked them right down to the nub and then used it to light his next one. The man had a black tongue (I kid you NOT!:eek: ) and lived to 87 with no significant health problems until the day he keeled over.
He had a black cat in his tiny little appartment that he originally named spooky. But when you pet that cat dust and SMOKE would puff out of it’s fur. So he was renamed smokey. It was freaking gross. Poor thing probably was really a grey cat that turned black from all the ash.
Yep. My Grandpa did that too. All over the place. Blech. I was a moderate smoker for a few years. But even then I was amazed at how disgusting some other smokers were about the habit.
I never knew or met him, but my Father-in laws 3rd wife told me that her first husband not only smoked 5 packs a day, he replaced the metal soap dish that was attached to the tile in the bathroom with an ashtray so he could smoke while in the shower!!! Jebus Khrist!:smack:
A British fellow I worked with while doing Hydrographic Surveys overseas. We stood 12 hour shifts and he would light 'em off the butts the whole time. his other weapon was a constantly-filled coffee cup. He was personally quite low-key, but must have been pretty wired internally - he fiddled constantly with the side-scan sonar and fathometer traces. Must have kept him occupied though, his sonar plots were always excellent.
I don’t remember him eating much - can you live on coffee & cigarettes?
Guy I knew in college was proud of himself when he got down to three packs a day. Going to the movies and getting an uninterrupted night’s sleep were not part of his life, I can tell you that.
He is a man about my age. WE are just over seventy. For more than half a century he has chain smoked six packs of non filtered Lucky Strikes every day. This is accompanied by fifty cups of strong and black coffee everyday. He rarely touches alcohol and has never done any recreational drugs.
He started smoking at age fourteen or fifteen, when we were classmates in school. By sixteen he was up to three packs of Luckies per day, contracted Bronchitis and for six months had a most dramatic cough, coughing up sputum. His fingers had turned bright orange by that time, and with time as he approached his six pack a day habit by age nineteen or so, his fingers were bright orange and brown (horse chestnut color) and remain this color to this day.
Miraculously he only has a mild case CPD, though does get frequent episodes of Bronchitis, with their accompanying coughing. He is single and runs a mail order business which he can operate from his smoke filled studio apartment, chain-smoking and coffee guzzling while he works.
He has always been nervous, with frequent spells of depression, and a few nervous breakdowns as a young man. Now he claims that caffeine and nicotine are the best and only medicines to make nervousness and depression tolerable. And they also serve as anti nervous breakdown remedies.
He wakes up from sleep coughing and sweating, and promptly grabs for a cigarette, which shortly alleviates the coughing and sweating. He moans, groans, and coughs in his sleep as his system screams for nicotine. He is an okay guy and a good friend, even if he his never without a cigarette or a cup of coffee. I smoke cigarettes occasionally but stay away from coffee and alcohol. 
No.