Originally Posted by
Biker395
Wow ... so many who've smoked! Smoking is kinda uncommon here on the west coast, but I've noticed it to be far more common on the east coast and especially Europe. I wonder if a poll among the 50+ers would reveal about how many of us smoked a significant amount at one time or another.
I hope you don't mind me asking this, but I'm curious. Why did you start? And what made you stop?
It isn't so uncommon. California has the second lowest percentage of adult smokers among the fifty states, but in 2010 14% of Californians were current smokers. Go back to the sixties and seventies when most of us were growing up, and the percentage would be much, much higher.
I can't speak for you Americans, but here in the UK it was something one did, almost a rite of passage to adulthood. It was advertised as being sophisticated and glamorous and presented as such on TV and in cinema (think Bogart, before he died of lung cancer). It was "cool".
In my own case, however, I was pretty impervious to all that. I didn't start smoking cigarettes until I was about 21, an unfortunate by-product of being a regular hash smoker at University. Oh, the irony.
I quit, after several failed attempts, when my recognition of my own mortality began to outweigh my desire for the next cigarette.