Smokin’ Behind The School

I don’t quite remember why I started smoking. It was back in fourth year high school. I remember going out back, to play cards, behind the school, with a bunch of other guys who were all smoking. The air would be thick with smoke but I really didn’t mind. Sometimes, they would pass around a cigarette and, when it came to me, I would take a puff out of curiosity. But I never inhaled.

After six months of this tentative routine, I decided to inhale. I started coughing a little because it tasted so bad and because I felt like I was being choked. But I kept on smoking anyway, until I finished that one cigarette. After that day, I would smoke a cigarette or two with the guys while we cut class and played cards. My attitude was, "I can quit anytime." But the more I smoked, the more addicted I became.

A few months later, I had graduated to purchasing my own cigarettes. Before long, I was going through a pack a day. I smoked Marlboro Reds, "blue seal," because all my friends did. We would cut school and hang out all day, smoking cigarette after cigarette. I was hooked! Before I knew it, my clothes, hands, and breath all started to smell of smoke.

Once You Puff, You Can’t Stop

When my parents discovered the pack of smokes I hid in my knapsack, they were seriously displeased and upset. They were both non-smokers, and they weren’t very keen on the idea that I was. They told me to quit numerous times, but I wouldn’t listen. I had no concern for the abuse I was inflicting on my body.

I had reached the point where I could not stop smoking. I tried more than once to quit and failed at it. And if I didn’t have a cigarette, I would become irritable and get a bad attitude real fast. I needed to have at least one every day. I’d smoke one every morning over coffee. But cigarettes are like potato chips; you can’t have just one.

I had been smoking for a year and a half when I decided to quit. I’m not certain what made me do it, I just know I did not want to see another cigarette. It was difficult at first, with friends all around that smoke, but after a while you get used to it. I chewed gum, I drank ice-cold water, I put a stick in my mouth and pretended to smoke until the urge disappeared (sometimes it’s only the routine of it that one craves). I imagined what a blackened, cancer-ravaged lung looked like. I said to myself that each stick shortened my life by seven minutes and one pack took away more than two hours from my pursuit of happiness.

Now, cigarette smoke is as great a nuisance to me as it is to any non-smoker. It makes me cough and I hate it when it gets on my clothes and hair. The most rabid anti-smoking activists, after all, are former smokers themselves.

Cancer Ain’t the Shiznit

I wrote this article to tell others to beware of starting to smoke. It may start off as a joke or dare, but you can become hooked and there is nothing funny about being addicted to a substance. There’s nothing cool about dying from cancer or emphysema. Or giving someone you love cancer because of your second-hand smoke.

There is nothing cool about being addicted to a substance that kills. Being hooked on cigarettes is like being hooked on any other drug. Nicotine is as addicting as heroin. Your body craves nicotine and you’re not satisfied—or can function—until you get it. The smartest thing you can do—and that goes for all you kids contemplating taking up the habit—is to stay away from cigarettes and any other addictive substance.

A Pack’s Facts

• Tobacco is a stimulant, so it makes you feel up.

• Cigarette smoke is composed primarily of tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide.

• Two or three drops of pure nicotine can rapidly kill an adult.

• Carbon monoxide is the stuff emitted by car exhausts.

• It also includes the poisons cyanide, arsenic, formaldehyde and ammonia.

• Ammonia is used to clean floors.

• A lit cigarette makes more than 4,000 different chemical compounds.

• Cigarettes are the leading cause of mouth, throat and lung cancer.

• The smoke is very bad for babies, before and after they are born.