I resisted the peer pressure to try cigarettes in high college and college.
I was tricked once when a neighbor of mine assured myself and others 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 enjoyed 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. Occasionally 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 neighbor John was hooked on cigarettes the same year I tried cloves for the first time, however the two incidents were completely unrelated. He was at a party and was trying to impress men there when he took a cigarette from a neighbor and took a few puffs. After doing this every weekend for a few weeks straight, he was already buying packs of cigarettes from the gas station to smoke when every one of us were on brunch 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 media air cleaner just to collect all of the minute hand smoke to prevent it all from merely filling his home and turning it into a cloudy haze of smoke when he puffs indoors. The media air cleaner is an essential unit in his home’s setup.