Why do people smoke?

because they are addicted
it makes them feel cool
it’s relaxing
the taste
you want to die prematurely but not badly enough to want to end it.
you have excess cash and no imagination
you hate having teeth
you hate smelling good
you wouldn’t smell good even if you didn’t smoke
you don’t want to be kissed
I’m sure I can think of more later.

@patg7590 ....lmao that was really humorous. Thank you for that.

@patg7590 You pretty much summed it up.

So you can take breaks at work

you need to get outside when it’s really really cold!

So that when my stomach starts hurting away from home, I have a quick though temporary way of calming it.

I think in the very beginning it has to be for most, peer pressure.

Because anyone who thinks about the money and health issues couldn’t possibly say they would do it could they?

At first, I smoked to be cool. Later, I simply wanted the nicotine fix to relieve stress. I could feel it when the hit kicked in.

Then one day I decided I’d find another way to deal with any distress, so I quit.

It’s cool,

@simone54 not!

They try it for fun. To be cool with their buds. Then Pow Wham Socko they are addicted for 25 years.

You did great, @patg7590, but you missed an important one:

To make the bus/streetcar/taxi/elevator/whatever-you-can’t-smoke-in come.

For the past 17 years, I have had to wait for things without the benefit of cigarette magic, but I remember.

[Edit} Oh, yeah, also as a conversational prop: to gesture with, to blow out smoke meaningfully, to stall for time.

I started because my best friend smoked. It felt good. 22 years later I went through the hell of quitting. Never again.

I started smoking at 16 because I lived in a small boring town and my best friend decided one day while we were driving around looking for trouble that we needed to have a bad habit. So we stole a bunch of cigarettes (we needed a bad habit, cause I guess shoplifting wasn’t bad enough) and we smoked them, trying out the different flavors and varieties.

I smoked cause I loved it. I smoked because I was addicted. I smoked because it became a lifestyle. I smoked because I surrounded myself with people that were “cool” enough to smoke too.

I recently quit on June 23rd. It has been one month and two days and I am positive that I will never smoke again. Quitting was hell, and I never knew it would be soooo hard. The problem now is that I notice how many people are smoking when I go anywhere. I hate being around it, and I have a new-found empathy for non-smokers.

Because we’re hooked. Don’t start!

@jamielynn2328 Good for you! The smoking was a bigger hell than quitting. Hang in there. You’ll make it & be cleaner, healthier & richer for it.

Cause they like the way it affects them, at first. I enjoy the occasional cigarette, it tends to calm me down and fuzz out my brain for a few minutes. But then it becomes more of a die-hard addiction for some people, and they cannot stop smoking without a good deal of help.

I have the same pack I have had for months in my safe next to a bottle of Grey Goose. It gathers dust for a rainy day when the stress is overwhelming and both are used together. I am lucky- it is not an addiction or a need for me- just a way to rebel against life every few months. However I hate the way I feel after- like my lungs are full of fluid so I have been shifting to painting unorthodox subjects to rebel.

What has not been mentioned in this thread is that for some it is also a fetish (Warning- Adult Link)
I knew a guy who stopped dating my best friend when she quit smoking
because for him it was sexual.

I smoke because I’m addicted but also because I enjoy it, in fact, I’m gonna have a cigar right now.

Because there’s something so leisurely about sitting around with some friends on someone’s front porch with a cigarette, or walking down a country road with a cigarillo.

I am not a smoker, but I probably smoke about a pack a year.

@petethepothead You can do both w/out a smoke, even after a few hits of the crip.

The volatile hydrocarbons in our bodies are compustable.
A volatile compound evaporates when heated. Thus, when set on fire, we smoke.

Most start due to peer pressure, and continue because they are addicted.

I started because I thought I looked cool and became addicted. I quite enjoy smoking or I wouldn’t do it.

I enjoyed it too. I liked smoking. I just didn’t want to be a smoker.

I wish I could have kept my sons from starting.

edit: combustible

Because it was one of life’s greater pleasures and because after you smoked a little you weren’t in danger of wrecking your car and killing some innocent person, abusing your spouse or doing any of the things associated with humanity’s other favorite addiction.

I definitely think it’s mostly peer pressure and/or boredom in the beginning. After a while, it’s the calm down. And then the nicotine starts to kick in.

I started smoking when I was 15, when I got my first job. It also had a nice benefit of covering up the smell of any partying I might have been doing. I quit smoking 3 years ago, I’m very happy that I did. In the last year I have had 2. It is something I enjoy doing, so I smoke sometimes on special occasions.

@rooeytoo – just slowly taking yourself away from your friends and loved ones or killing them depending how careful you are about where you are when you smoke.

@Bri_L – People have been smoking since the beginning of time and not everyone died from smoking or from diseases related to smoking. Today many people who smoked are dying at ripe old ages from non smoking related diseases. Many kids grew up in homes where parents smoked and have not succumbed. But I don’t dispute that smoking is bad for you, I just said I think it is one of life’s pleasures and I truly know more people who died from alcohol related diseases or from alcohol related occurrences than from smoking.

I always say, if the AMA decides tomorrow that smoking is not as bad for you as they thought (and let’s face it, they change their minds about a lot of things, consider Thalidimyde) DO NOT GET BETWEEN ME AND THE NEAREST CONVENIENCE STORE SELLING CIGARETTES because I will run you down on my way to buy a pack.

@rooeytoo – as far as the first paragraph goes it is a matter of each person. It is not if but how much you are killing yourself and those around you. That is a fact and it is indisputable. You are putting concentrated poisons into your body plain and simple. As for the rest of your claims I would need to see some data on “many kids” and “many people”.

As far as the second my friend I am out of your way at the word go!

I smoke for two reasons. One, I am addicted to nicotine. Two, I enjoy it. The taste of tobacco is actually pleasing to me. I occasionally use Camel Snus, and they taste just fine. I got a prescription for nicotine lollipops, and after the first one, I haven’t touched them again. Something about them is just foul. They made me jumpy and made my heart race. Nice waste of $38.

I have smoked for almost 30 years. I should be dead if I were to believe all the hype the anti-smoking Nazis spew. When they tell me that someone walking past me and accidently inhales the smoke from my ciggy is doomed to a horrible death, I laugh. Bullshit, if I have been putting one hundred times as much smoke in my lungs for 30 years as they get in 30 seconds, then I should have been dead twenty years ago.

I know people who don’t smoke that are in far worse shape than I am health wise, and the real culprit isn’t cigarettes at all, the REAL culprit that causes lung cancer is the exhaust from the internal combustion engines, and especially diesel. That’s why I laugh at the health nuts jogging/bicycling along or on the streets of the city. They have no idea what sort of crap they are putting in their bodies as they exercise. Ciggies aren’t good for you, but they get a far worse rap than they deserve.

I was going to put a smart ass comment here that explained that people smoke from the friction because their lube breaks down, but then I found another reason to answer.

@evelyns_pet_zebra- there are always enough exceptions, people to call “bull shit” to the facts. I counter you with my Grandma who died at a ripe old age of 55 from lung cancer and emphysema. And I know more like her for everyone like you.

As I said to rooeytoo, it isn’t if. You are killing yourself and those around you.

And If your using non-smokers, their poor health and what they in-hale in comparison to your perceived better health smoking, well, given your the fact your inhaling all the same things they are plus the smokers poisons I seriously doubt their ailments are related strictly to those things you listed.

I also question your assessments.

Here is my conspiracy theory, the tobacco industry became the scapegoat, the Lieutenant Calley if you will. We are being killed slowly and surely by what we eat and drink. In order to make livestock grow faster they are factory farmed and fed every kind of drug and crap to aid the process. What comes out of the ground is just as bad, fed with chemical fertilizers or the crap from the livestock which is already full of crap, sprayed with pesticides, the soil depleted. It is impossible (here anyhow) to buy any consumable liquid (except some beer) in anything except plastic which is probably carcinogenic, especially if it sits in the sun a bit before it arrives in your local supermarket. Where by the way your meat is dyed red and the fruit and veg is sprayed with all sorts of stuff to make it look pretty and never turn brown.

I could go on but why bother. This is what I worry about, not the fact that I might be inhaling a minute portion of smoke from a guy smoking 4 feet away from me. But if the big money keeps the population freaking about second hand smoke, they can get away with all the other stuff that is going on.

I lived in NYC in the 70’s, that was when I had to stop wearing my hard contacts. There was so much crap in the air, my eyelids became glued to my contacts. So I think what Evelyn said has a lot of truth in it, the air in cities is gonna get you just as quickly. Maybe you should start wearing a gas mask???

But hey I have already quit, actually July 31 1990 was the last time I had a cigarette, alcohol or any mood altering substance except caffeine and sugar which I quit about a month ago. Hell, I will probably live forever!

First, Congratu – fricku – ever – love’n – lations on quitting!!!!! It will make a difference.

But the belief that smoking is any more benign because there is there is so much out there killing us to some degree that can’t be measured in an amount comparable to smoke, why bother worrying about it doesn’t make sense to me. That just seems like the “We all gotta die sometime” mentality.

@Bri_L I admire your position on this subject, and while I have no inclination to debate you on such an emotional subject, I do have just one little question.

That just seems like the “We all gotta die sometime” mentality. <—- so you expect to live forever? Good luck with that.

@evelyns_pet_zebra – I question the sincerity of your admiration for my position given that you had “just one little question” and it was a very lame attempt at sarcasm that fell flat in it’s unrealistic accusation. You were not even in the ball park.

It did further illustrate the “out there grasping at straws” nature and negativism in the pro-smokers mentality. So thanks for that.

People smoke because they have a keen sense of irony. After all, cigarettes and cigars are legal, non-mood-altering things and people still give you hell for smo
king them.

@rooeytoo: Thank you for being the first one to bring up “humanity’s other favorite addiction” as you put it. Nobody seems to care that my smoking mother who almost never drinks is safer behind the wheel of a car than someone who drinks on a regular basis. Hey, she smokes, so she’s a sinner, right?

I asked a girl once, “Do you smoke after sex?” She replied “I don’t know, I never looked.

@patg7590—pretty much!

smoking is gross, i dont understand it. never will.

@KatawaGrey – I never cease to be amazed at those who quote the dire statistics of smoking related illnesses yet seem to be blind to the numbers of innocents killed by drunks in cars and kids and spouses abused. I think it is something like 90% of police calls are alcohol related. Where I live, it is legal to have open alcohol containers in a moving car, you can drink while you drive as long as you stay below the legal limit but they are trying to pass a law that makes it illegal to smoke with a kid in your car. I don’t get it.

I would much rather get into a car with a smoker than a drinker!

@rooeytoo: Amen. I think it is ridiculous that people should be allowed to drink alcohol while driving. It is preposterous.

@KatawaGrey and @rooeytoo – where are people “allowed to drink alcohol while driving”? That is disgusting. But this question was not about that. This question was about smoking not drinking.

I have lost 4 people close to me in 3 separate incidents to drinking and driving as well as had my own vehicle totaled by a drunk while it was parked on a 25mph street at 3 in the afternoon.

Once again there are the generalized statements that deflect the facts that smoking kills and is bad. Is it a gun? No. Is it an immediate intoxicant? No.

Is it something that will effect the quality of the smokers life and the life of the people, especially the children in the car? Hell yes.

Geeze, to say do it because that is worse just doesn’t make sense. You may as well let people drink and drive because by your “smoke because drinking and driving is worse” mentality, rape is so much worse.

If you go through life doing one thing just because you justify it by finding a list of other things in your mind you think are worse then your living a craps shoot.

Also, I don’t mean to imply anyone or their relatives are “sinners”.

@Bri_L: The point of our side conversation (perhaps it should have been in whispers I do apologize) is to point out that everyone is ready to vilify smokers no matter what. My mother had cancer 10 years ago. It had nothing to do with her smoking. If she hadn’t smoked a day in her life, if her parents had never smoked, she would have gotten cancer. Smoking is not a good thing but neither is it so bad as everyone likes to say. My mother is a responsible smoker. She doesn’t smoke in her car or at restaurants (even before the ban went out in CT). She doesn’t even smoke in her own house when non-smokers are over. Yet, people still say awful things to and about her. People still have the gall to say that she is not a good parent because she smokes (no other reason mind you. I am very healthy, graduated top 10% of my class, got into a very good private university, and am generally happy and well-adjusted, but she is a bad parent because she smokes). @rooeytoo and I were discussing how it is so rare to hear about how awful someone is for drinking on a regular basis. Yes smoking is bad for you, but the people who smoke are not.

@KatawaGrey and @rooeytoo – You know I was thinking about my take on this and I owe you both an apology.

The question is “Why do people smoke?” NOT “Why shouldn’t people smoke?”. You two are in fact answering the question. I did in my very first post but have not been with you all. I have been badgering you with discussion when you have simply been answering the question.

And I would never say all people who smoke are bad. Just smoking doesn’t make you bad just like having a drink doesn’t make you bad. I hope I didn’t come across that way. I can see that I did though and I didn’t mean to.

I am sorry.

@Bri_L: That is quite all right. I also reacted in a defensive manner because I’m used to people saying they hate smokers (rather than the act of smoking). I too apologize for any sharpnes on my part. I have always respected you and your answers.

@KatawaGrey – ditto that my friend. You all have been some of the most polite I have ever typed with!

@Bri_L: Thank goodness we are so evolved as to be able to get past this. :)

@KatawaGrey – Fuc…oh, sorry I misread that. Just kidding. It very much is!

it makes you cool lol this post probally gets removed for a “lol”

Times have changed now but when I started years ago, cigarettes were advertised everywhere, many people smoked and it just seemed like the thing to do. And then once you start, cigarettes are highly, highly addictive. I stopped years ago but I know people who just can’t. And I believe, and I would have to go and do research to find evidence, cigarette companies add chemicals that increase the addicitve qualities of cigarettes. I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong. Our government have recently changed legislation so patches are now available on the PBS at a subsidised price and I think this a great step in helping people give up. They used to cost the same as fags.

This is a report discussing the addictive qualities of cigarettes.
http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/pagescm/1004/$File/chemicalfactorsaddictivenesscigarettes.pdf

In the 70’s, no one partied at the disco’s without their pack of smokes. But regardless, I really enjoy smoking. Nothing is more relaxing than taking a “smoke break.” However, I always hated the smell, the health risks, and all that. I found a perfect way to have my cake and eat it too, It’s called an e-cigarette, and I love it!