So I've been thinking about this recently.....
My dad smoked when i was a kid and my mum hated it.
I nagged him to give up at about age 9, having become very anti smoking after, presumably (can't quite remember) having seen the black tarred lung documentary at school.
He eventually gave in, and i remember was very grumpy for ages, and kept eating mintoes (Do they still exist?)
I still remember my mother saying "have a mint" and him saying- I don't want a ****** mintoe.
So, after all this early anti-smoking indoctrination, you would think i would definitely not become a smoker......Hmm, no.
I always knew smoking was not good or cool, and resisted peer pressure of a few slightly wannabe cooler friends in my early teens. I wasn't particularly interested.
But then approx age 16 ish, saw i guy i fancied smoking (thought, maybe, it might impress him??? err- no) most friends smoked at least here and there, the "boyfriends" i had usually smoked and i also wanted to see what it was like.....There had to be something in it right? (err no, wrong again)
Also i wanted to know "how" to smoke, for the purposes of smoking something other than a cigarette.... (My adventurous streak has always got me into trouble) At that age also you just wanna do whatever your friends are doing and what might be thought of as cool- you don't really want to be different.
So, remember my boss (in my first job) gave me my first cigarette (I asked him for it) and i smoked it and genuinely thought "What's the fuss about? Why would you want to do this 20 times a day??
This is not that great."
I had to be instructed in the art of properly inhaling and keeping the smoke in the lungs i remember.
So, from there , admittedly i didn't cough and be sick or anything, but i didn't exactly enjoy it either, I somehow ended up buying my first packet(Silk Cut)- at first mostly to keep in my bedroom drawer to look at and occasionally smoke out of my window, thinking i was very cool.....
And then i smoked with my boss and friends, and i kept on smoking just long after the trying it period, and obviously somewhere along the line got addicted , very addicted. I was never aware of it, or even that i was going to get addicted, didn't understand the nature of addiction really, or how addictive cigarettes are.
At the end of my" full time smoker" life about 17 years later (with no real attempt at stopping inbetween-about two years ago was the end of the "full time " bit anyway....not completely the END, sigh) i was on at least 40 a day. More sometimes. Even smokers used to comment how much i smoked.....
So, Do you remember your first one? How long before you were addicted?
I can never, and couldn't at the time, pinpoint a time when i became an addict. I guess it's a warning that we never know we are slipping into addiction but our use just increases, and then we need the stuff to function. I used to think because I didn't really actively " enjoy" or "get a high " from cigarettes, i couldn't get addicted.