Inspired by the Pit thread, I’m really curious. I’m a non-smoker who never even considered trying, but I can sort of understand people who started smoking before the health warnings became unambiguously dire, and before it completely lost its “I’m cool” image.
But… I can’t imagine anyone taking it up after, oh, about 1980. And yet I see lots of people in their 20s who smoke. What is the appeal?
My Best Friend and I started smoking at age 13 because the Cameron twins, Bruce and Brian, showed us how. We would do ‘anything’ to please them because we had crushes on them. Mind you, this was waaaay back, before the rainbow thing and before the notion of giving head was not having sex. We hadn’t heard of these practices and if we had, they would have been icky and not something we’d do. A closed mouth kiss made us sluts.
Fast forward: it’s 1970 and my daugher was just born. In the recovery room I asked the nurse for an ashtray so that I could smoke. She immediately produced one! My OB/GYN had an ashtray in each of the examining rooms so that the patient as well as he could smoke.
There were TV ads - “4 out of 5 doctors recommend” - and some tobacco brand was advertised.
It was a different world. You had to be there…
Sorry, I got carried away with my own story rather than the question asked by the OP.
A young friend explained her smoking for the same reason she got her first tattoo - to piss off her Dad.
Here’s a suggestion: nicotine has a really cool buzz for the first month or so. Then it decreases in intensity, so you smoke more to try and get that buzz again. But it never comes. But you need to have another cigarette, because you are addicted to nicotine now. I feel confident to say that anybody who has never been addicted to a narcotic can have absolutely no idea what it’s like until they experience it. As well, I feel it’s true enough to say that likely no one who ever started smoking even considered the addiction part of it… or the health risks… then one day it happens to them.
In a nutshell, whatever reasons you had for starting to smoke are moot once you become addicted. After that, you are taking a maintenance dose every time you light up.
I smoked my first cigarette in high school, either junior or senior year … so 1988/1989. I did it because I was full of teenage angst and misery, and one particularly bad night I happened upon some friends who were smoking and decided that I felt a little self-destructive. Lucky for me, though, after that night I only smoked once in a blue moon (it fucked with my voice) and I never got addicted. I know that I smoked off and on – mostly when I was drinking with smokers – through college, and I think I had my very last cigarette sometime shortly after graduating. I don’t even remember anymore, because it wasn’t anything significant.
I started smoking in 1988, a bit older probably than average (I was 21). I’d snuck a few before then as a teenager (my mother smokes) and didn’t like them, though I did like the high. I started smoking because I worked around an all smoking hotel staff and frankly I liked the look and the social aspects (“One of the guys”) and most of my family smoked (pretty much everybody but my siblings and my pyromaniac grandmother). I never had to “teach” myself to smoke- I took to it completely naturally, never retched or choked or anything, and frankly (to quote Piper Laurie in Carrie “I liiiiiked it… Gawd help me, I liiiiiiiiiiiked it!”).
I quit for three and a half-years and started smoking again in 2001. I’d like to say it was because of September 11 because it was around the same time, but it wasn’t. I had smoked some Cuban cigars a friend brought me from Charleston (where it’s legal to import them in very restricted quantities due to some loophole) and basically I thought they were okay but they really made me want a cigarette, and I thought I could handle just one. A week later I was buying packs.
I started smoking (in college, stupidly enough) to give me something to do in bars beside drinking. Of course, all it did was make me thirstier.
I started smoking because I love tobacco, and have ever since I was a little kid, when I determined that cigarettes smelled good, and cigars and pipes smelled even better. I smoked my first cigarette at 11, and haven’t looked back since.
I love tobacco’s taste. I love its smell. I love it when it’s smoked, whether I inhale it into my lungs or merely hold it in my mouth. I love the sweetness of a virginia tobacco, or the smokiness of an oriental, or the darkness of a halfzware cigarette, or the flavor of a good dip or chaw, or the divine aroma of some Scotch snuff. Whether it’s smoked, sniffed, or chewed, tobacco just smells and tastes divine.
I know it isn’t the exact same thing but: I started chewing tobacco when my college roomate and I watched The Outlaw Josie Wales. We thought it was cool. (I’ve given it up long since.)
So maybe role models are part of it?
I have a brother who started smoking when he was wandering around Europe. Some soldier offered him a smoke at it would have been rude for him not to accept.
I started cuz I always liked the idea of inhaling and exhaling smoke. I’ve always said that if I was blind, I’d never have started. In fact if I went blind today I’d probably quit, or drastically cut back. Before I started smoking, my firends and I used to drill the orange plug out of cap guns, (the kind with the strip of red paper with the black dots on it) and inhale the smoke from those. If you put three or four ‘caps’ under the hammer at once, you’d get a pretty big puff of smoke. Hell, I could blow smoke rings years before I took my first puff of tabacco. So that’s it for me, not for looks, not to be cool, not becase saw it in the movies, because I thought I’d really enjoy it, and I did, and I do.
I started around 1980 when I was 15. I had been a ‘good’ girl until then; the year I turned 15 I started doing a lot of rebellious things - smoking tobacco and pot, drinking, skipping class, not getting good grades, etc. I can’t pin down any real reason. None of my friends smoked so it wasn’t peer pressure in my case. Probably the parental influence, although I hid it from them for a year - they both smoked, so they couldn’t smell tobacco on me. We (both parents and I) have all since quit. 
I have smoked about 3 cigarettes in my life. The reason, invariably: HAWT CHYX offered me them.
I started smoking at age 18 because I wanted to look cool. I stopped 3 weeks later when I realized it wasn’t working.
My brother and I were very much anti-smoking when we were growing up. So much so that he stole the cigarettes from my mother’s purse and cut them in half with the scissors when he was 10. She was quite pissed about that, but that was how much he hated mom’s smoking back then.
Cut to when my brother joined the Navy in 1989. He came home on leave the next year and had started up smoking. His explanation was that the Navy would give people smoke breaks, but if you didn’t smoke, you didn’t get the breaks… so he started smoking.
I should hope that this is no longer true. I don’t think that the Navy would want to encourage seamen ( 
) to start smoking. Don’t they want healthy, fit men and women?
My first real boyfriend did it, so did his really hot (second real boyfriend) and my best friend (also a guy) all did. The peer pressure was too much for me.
7 years later I buy by the carton and almost quit my job when they considered going no smoking.
That’s about all I was going to say. All that keeps people smoking is the weak attenuated buzz they are getting - starting out it is palpable. I remember reading years ago that all the ancient societies that had access to both tobacco and marijuana used to smoke the tobacco and make things from the hemp.
I started smoking in my early 20s, just every once in a while, probably to be cool.
At some point it became a stress management tool. I would smoke during periods of intense stress or intense boredom. I lived in Siberia and I’d smoke, just because there was nothing else to do. I would just sit and smoke until it was time to go to sleep. I would binge smoke, during peak stress I’d smoke 1-2 packs a day and then drop it for months or even a year at a time. I quit Xmas day as a promise to my wife. The only waiver on the promise is that I can have a cigarette if I get shot.
Son of a bitch…me too. I remember specifically when he spit on the dog’s head. He spit on everything. I thought it was sooo cool and got one of Dad’s packs of Beechnut. I graduated to Copenhagen (better rush) and finally quit ten years ago (the single hardest thing I ever did).
Now, concerning the OP, my best friend’s father was career National Guard and he would get his cigarettes from the C-rations his father used to keep in the garage. People seem to forget that Uncle Sam included a couple of Lucky Strikes with every package of food that he gave every soldier at one time. :eek: