I resisted the peer pressure to try cigarettes in high school and college.
I was tricked once when a friend of mine assured me that he had these special clove cigarettes that lacked tobacco and nicotine altogether.
Stupidly, I trusted him on his word and tried those clove cigarettes and loved them! I bought a pack and blew through half of them before I read the ingredient list and realized my grave error. Thankfully I was smart enough to throw out the rest of the pack before I got hooked on tobacco. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t thrown away those cigarettes and kept smoking them until I was craving more from the store. My close friend John was hooked on cigarettes the same year I tried cloves for the first time, but the two incidents were completely unrelated. He was at a party and was trying to impress girls there when he took a cigarette from a friend and took a few puffs. After doing this every weekend for a few months straight, he was already buying packs of cigarettes from the gas station to smoke when we were on lunch breaks at work. I would shake my head when I thought about how easy it was for him to get hooked. Now he uses an air purifier just to collect all of the second hand smoke to prevent it all from merely filling his apartment and turning it into a cloudy haze of smoke when he puffs indoors. The air purifier is an essential device in his home’s setup.