People just tend to make excuses as to why they started smoking. I realize that if you start young, like those who started at 14 because of friends, then it can be more difficult to say no, but I guess I didn't hang around with kids who did that and I had enough sense to know it was a dumb choice. I was never offered a cigarette and I was never offered drugs. I didn't hang out and associate with people who did that and if I did I didn't know it. If I was asked I would have said no. Cigarettes were always seen as bad but if I wanted to "pretend" as a child no one cared. I think the people who get so uptight about kids having fake cigarettes are the ones whose kids are more likely to smoke because it is more of a novelty.
I don't really feel sorry for people who start smoking and claim it's because they had friends who did it, they wanted to fit in, they wanted to get smoke breaks at work, or it was advertising. People really need to be their own person!
Some of us grew up in households where both parents smoked. Some of us had uncles, aunts, older siblings, grandparents and neighbors who smoked. For my family, it was absolutely the norm to smoke and all four of my siblings and I were smokers by the time we were each 16 years old. I am the one who mentioned the candy cigarettes, and kids really did "pretend" to smoke them as they were imitating their parents, or other adults they saw on TV, or the Marlboro man in the TV ads, billboards and magazines. Cigarettes are no longer allowed to be advertised on TV, radio and billboards (I think -- I haven't seen a billboard for cigs that I can recall), but honestly when I was little, the ads were everywhere. I still remember the slogans I heard on TV: "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro country." "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should."
When I grew up, cigarettes and cigarette advertising where everywhere. You could smoke on airplanes, submarines, movie theaters, shopping malls, restaurants, on buses, etc. Few concessions were made for non-smokers, too. Things have sure changed since then, thankfully! So while I do agree that we each need to be our own selves, I also want you to be aware that there are many, many smokers who sort of fell into smoking without really meaning to. You wrote that "cigarettes were always seen as bad." No, they weren't. Perhaps you always saw them as bad, but even after the Surgeon General reported they were dangerous, many people still saw them as "cool" or in some way desirable. If the adults in your life had smoked, you also may have seen them differently. The thing about them is that it doesn't take long to get addicted to nicotine. I am glad you never smoked and I am glad that things have changed so that in some cities, you can't smoke anywhere in public. But this was not the case when I grew up.
I do agree that people shouldn't make excuses about why they smoke. I think that if you truly want to break free of it, you have to admit you're addicted -- you're a drug addict, really, as nicotine is a drug -- and making excuses doesn't get you to quit smoking. However, as I said originally, I think that, because there is absolutely no beneficial aspect to tobacco, it should be outlawed. Again, if I were to first invent cigarettes today and seek FDA approval, I'd be denied as they are inherently bad for human health.
Tobacco companies to this day try to advertise and market to young people because they know if they can "hook" a kid (far easier than marketing it to the over-30 group -- I cannot name even one person I know who started smoking at 30 or older), that kid will be addicted and they got themselves a customer for decades to come. We all have done stupid things as teens and young adults -- smoking is just one of the dumb things people that age have been known to do. But while the teen who does the dumb thing of waiting till the last minute to cram for his final exam will likely grow into an adult who learns to improve his time management skills, a teen who does the dumb thing of smoking can become physically addicted to nicotine and unwittingly make it part of his life for the next three or four decades.
We as a society should make it much harder for kids to smoke, and one way to do that would be to outlaw tobacco. Another way to do it is to make it unprofitable for people in the tobacco industry. If they stop making money, as I said before, they will stop making cigarettes.
-Dorothy
