There was never any conscious decision whatsoever. It’s just something that I fell into, along with the drinking and weed smoking, in college. We’d be drunk or high and partying and whatnot and somebody would have cigarettes around and we would smoke them and that was that. Eventually I started rolling my own cigarettes with good tobacco from the local shop; those were always a big hit. Everyone on my floor was always asking me to roll them cigarettes and joints because I was such an ace at rolling. Sometimes I’d make special cigarettes, like with pipe tobacco mixed in; or sometimes I would dip them in whiskey and let them dry (people really loved those.) I continued to smoke socially, while partying, for the next four years or so. I would also occasionally have a cigarette in the morning if I was feeling stressed. I rarely smoked more than three cigarettes a day and rarely smoked every day of the week. But nowadays I don’t really smoke at all. Every now and then, if I’m really drunk and outside of a bar with smokers, I’ll bum one but that’s the extent of it.
Started smoking dope at around 16, 17 or so. Smoking cigarettes was an easy way of getting a little high during the day.
The dope was easy to quit (I still have a drag or two once every couple of months). Cigarettes, not so much. :smack:
I was bored, and it allowed an unlimited number of breaks at work.
I was about 23 and had been a pain-in-the-butt anti-smoker when I learned to smoke for a role I was playing onstage.
During the course of the play, I would light up just after each entrance, about 18 or 19 times per show.
When the show was done, I was hooked and continued for about 22 more years. I quit six years ago when my daughter was three years old and started to follow me out of the house when I went out for a cigarette. She’ll be nine next month and is not aware that Dad ever smoked, so far as I know.
Congratulations to those who have quit!
I do have a question, though… how did you overcome the initial awkwardness and unattractiveness of the actual process of smoking? I can sort of understand the social benefits, and I seem to recall a thread discussing about the benefits of smoking once you’ve already started, but smoking has such a high ugly factor (ashes, butts, stink, etc) to get over. Is it easier if you start with, say, pipes? What about chewing tobacco?
VernWinterbottom, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone starting smoking because of acting, when they wouldn’t have otherwise. Always wondered whether that ever happened.
I started because both my parents smoked, didn’t mind if I did too, and my cool older cousin turned me on to it, and I wanted her to like me. There wasn’t the awareness, nor the stigma then that there is now. I smoked 10 years and then quit.
Smoking is a strong risk factor for breast cancer. I believe that the combination of smoking + childhood second-hand smoke caused my breast cancer.
Don’t they make special prop cigarettes that are tobacco-free so actors can smoke for a part without the bad stuff?
I saw the battle lines being drawn way back in '84 and I didn’t want to be on the side of the non-smokers, who struck me as whiny and pompous, even though I was one. Non-smokers were starting to look like the oppressors and smokers like the oppressed, and I didn’t want to be on the side of the “oxygen fascists.”
I organized a satirical protest (I think maybe some took it seriously) against new anti-smoking rules at my college. Since I was taking such a strong stand in favor of smoking, I figured I’d better start. I’d always felt like a smoker trapped in a non-smoker’s body anyway.
I think at the time I compared the situation to South African apartheid, only with smoking you got to choose whether you were “white” or “black.”
Even today I can’t tell whether or not I was serious about any of this. I really do smoke though; that at least isn’t an ironic pose. :rolleyes:
Best answer so far. 
I must have been about 6 or 7 when I had my first puff on a ciggy. An older boy I hung around with(he was about 11.) gave me a go on his cigarette while we were balancing on a 6 ft high wall. After mocking me for not taking a proper drag, I got my first lung-full of nicotine, went very dizzy, and fell off the wall. Fortunately it was onto grass and I only sprained my wrist, somehow.
Glutton for punishment that I am, I’m still smoking now. I’m a little fatalistic and just know that if I ever stopped completely, the week I no longer felt the urge, I’d probably get hit by a runaway milk-float, or something!
Maybe where you lived, but the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population who were cigarette smokers was 36.8 percent in 1974. (Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 2003.)
I started at 17 and I don’t remember why. I might have been bored or looking for the next buzz. I was already into pot and alcohol and acid, why not one more vice?
I’m now 46 and still smoke so my lungs hate me. At least I quit drinking so my liver is happier.
Until about five years ago (I quit nine years ago, after 26 years of 2-plus packs daily), I would have said because I was a stupid kid trying to be cool, in spite of spending years hassling my mother about her smoking.
And that IS why I TRIED it. Why I instantly became almost a chain smoker (seriously, over a pack the first day) is because I have Attention Deficit Disorder, and my brain LOVED nicotine. It cleared things right up.
And for the poo-poo set: this is how my having ADD first came to light. I quit, and immediately lost the ability to read fiction. Immediately. I went from several novels a month to maybe 3 altogether since I quit 9 years ago. (If that, I only actually recall reading one, “The Road”.)
Just talking about it makes me want to smoke, purely for the focus factor. I think nicotine works better for me than Adderall, but it’s not an option, period.
I was about nine-ish…small town, nothing to do, older cousins, pack of cowboy killers…smoked for about fifteen years, quit for a year, then started up again. Smoked for another twelve years…this time for six years…then I lost my job the same month as the boy was deployed to Iraq four years ago…I picked up a pack in reaction to the stress. I still smoke about half a pack of the girliest, ultra light cigs you can buy every day, although I don’t smoke inside my home.
Like someone said upthread, it’s an old friend now…it would be a bitch to give it up again.
I smoked for the first time when I was 18. I had just moved to college, my friends were smoking outside a concert venue, so I tried it out. I don’t think I even knew how to inhale them correctly back then. I smoked very irregularly the next couple years. Maybe one cigarette a month, if that. Usually just when I was drunk at parties. I started to enjoy it more and more, but my girlfriend at the time didn’t approve, so I never bought a pack or anything. Well, we broke up when I was 22 and my addiction began. I bought a pack that night, partly because I was stressed out and partly to celebrate my newfound liberty to destroy my lungs. Within a month or two I was a pack a day smoker. Cigarettes felt like something I always had needed, but never knew. If I was at an awkward party, I could step outside for a smoke. And no one even thinks anything about it! I could make conversation with anyone else in the same position as me. I smoked regularly for about a year. Now I have graduated college, and have moved home. My goal is to quit completely, because I don’t want my parents to know my shameful secret. But I’ve still managed to have a couple a day. The other day I found a pristine, unsmoked Marlboro lying in a field of grass and it almost made me believe in God. Needless to say, I smoked it immediately. This is going to be hard…
Why did I have the first cigarette? Curiosity.
Why did I continue? Smoking feels good. Especially when you’re drinking. A cigarette is a mild stimulant.
Why is it so hard to quit? For me, interestingly, it’s not primarily a physical addiction. I go days at a time without a cigarette, no cravings. Without even meaning to I went cold turkey last Christmas when I was visiting the parents (they frown on both smoking and drinking). Didn’t even think about it. But the second I have a beer - man, I want a smoke so bad. I’ve come to associate alcohol with smoking. Since I enjoy a drink now and then :rolleyes: it’s hard to quit.
I actually started smoking because a friend’s mom predicted I would.
When we went off to college and got in the same dorm room she told her son
she always figured I would become “another smug author pictured with a beard and pipe”.
She meant it as a dig but I soon had both.
Age 23-ish, and it was … just one of those things. I mean, there was a hot girl who smoked, sure, but that wasn’t really the reason. I guess at that point, everyone around me smoked. It gave me something to do while we sat on the balcony of the club and drank.
Yeah, there are herbal cigarettes and some actors use them. They’re hard to find, whereas normal cigarettes are everywhere (well, they used to be). Also, they do NOT smell like cigarettes; they smell like really nasty weed or maybe a pile of burning lawn clippings.
I smoked very briefly in my early 20s, mostly clove cigarettes. (I know, I know.) I started because I honestly thought they smelled good, and was also hoping to tamp down my hypersensitive sense of smell. I french-exhaled to enhance that effect. I quit after about four months of about one a day because they never stopped making me feel jittery after a smoke, and because blowing your nose after french-exhaling is a vivid demonstration of what you’re putting in your lungs. After that I occasionally had a cigarette when out with my friend who smoked. If I knew anyone who smoked now, I might still bum a puff or two if I’m getting sleepy before I want to on a night out… but I don’t know anyone who smokes these days, and you can’t do it indoors anyway.
If you need the nicotine, why not self-medicate with nicotine patches or gum?
I started when I was in college because I was in a band and those were the rules. Also the cigarette machine in the student union where they let us rehearse was rigged and we could get them for free.
And because it was cool.
I quit when I was around 25, then picked it back up 2 years later. I quit again in 2001 and so far it seems to be a permanent thing.