If you smoke or used to smoke, why did you start smoking?

[Jeebo]

15. It was 1966. I was 16.

I followed a neighborhood kid into the garage in our back yard where he pulled out a pack of Marlboro reds and handed me one. I don't really remember why I tried a puff, I think it was just because it was something else to do, a new experience. Isn't that one of the things life is all about, just having a variety of new experiences?

Well, I liked it. I actually enjoyed that very first cigarette I ever smoked, I really did. Years later, as an adult smoker of a pack and and a half to two packs a day of menthol cigarettes, I began to realize there was something unusual about that. So I started asking other smokers the question, Did you like the first cigarette you ever smoked? For years, a decade or more, I must have asked hundreds of smokers that question. Almost all of them answered that question, No! They said they coughed, they wheezed, they got a little sick, they hated it. There were only a couple of them besides me who actually claimed to have liked the first cigarette they ever smoked.

I realized then that I was just a born nicotinic. I'm one of a rare breed.

I finally quit smoking after 24 years. I still remember the date, and I never will forget it, because it was one of the important dates of my life: March 23, 1990. I would be dead by now otherwise, I firmly believe. It was one of those traveling smoking-cessation hypnosis seminars that came through here from somewhere in Indiana. Answering their ad in the local newspaper, I drove through a blizzard to one of those big hotels near the local mall where they had rented a conference room. The moderator/hypnotist said that in three and a half hours, we would walk out of there and never smoke again. I raised my hand and said, "That's not what I want. What I want is to walk out of here in three and a half hours and never WANT to smoke again." A woman behind me said, "Yah!" The moderator/hypnotist said that he couldn't promise we would never want to smoke again, but that he was going to give us ways to deal with those tobacco cravings. And I never again had one of those absolutely overwhelming cravings that had always foiled me in earlier cessation attempts. Whatever he did, it worked! Just like magic! And that's why I'm still above the ground. Those damn things would have killed me by now, I am sure.

-- Ron