No longer. Did for 24 + years. Started at 10 when older bro and cousin wanted to have a smoke, made me and younger bro have one so we couldn't tell on them as we'd be guilty also.
By HS I was up to/over a pack a day. First chew was a bite off a bar of Day's Work or Brown's Mule, while helping a friend's dad fix an antenna on a roof. That was fun!. Smoked at the top of Mt Rainier at 20 years old, thought the guys I went up there with were a-holes for not letting me have one in the igloo we built to shelter from the blizzard that was going on one night. Made me go out in a full blown white out. (I stayed real close to the entrance to that igloo on a white glacier during a white out)
By 21, well over a pack a day, plus chewing (leaf or plug, none of that stuff in a can). Also smoked cigars at times, pipe on occasion, and real snuff, the kind you snort up your nose off the back of the web of your hand like in the 1700's.
Drank a bunch too. Was so bad I was one of those guys you see with a grit in the corner of his mouth and smoke the whole thing without using his hands once. So bad, I'd go to sleep and leave a half a ciggie in the ashtray next to the bed along with a half can of beer and I'd have to light up and finish the beer if I got up to micturate (look it up, crossword clue this morning while in the john doing my business)
Gave the smokes up a year and half after giving up the beer. Did the smoking help to cause the tumor I had removed from my kidney a few years back? Who knows, maybe it was the gas or diesel I used to wash car/backhoe parts, or the chemicals I worked with at times, the formalin from biology class. All I know is I can breath pretty good for a Medicare constituent as of tomorrow.
On occasion, in traffic and such, when I smell someone smoking I get an urge for one..............................for a minute.
Still absolutely love the smell of tobacco that's not burning.
Scheidt is so addictive to most people, some studies say a very high percentage of those that try even one cigarette. Worse than opiates they say.
That nicotine makes for a pretty good bug spray though.
Geno
PS, my secret so far for not starting back up................I don't smoke the first one, don't bum one from a friend, didn't smoke the ones I found in the glove box a week or two after quitting, or the ones I had stashed in the dress shirt pockets in the closet. I hated to run out. No matter how bad, even 30+ years later, I don't smoke one even when everyone else around is.
