Legal Smoking Age Options

[tkproduce]

Thought I might as well have one on smoking as there's one on drinking.
Most of Europe the legal age is 16.
I believe it's 20 or 21 in the States.
I had my first one when I was 13 or 14, but I never got addicted, although I have a few sometimes with my friends.

[tkproduce]

I grew up in a family full of smokers and I absolutely hated it and said that I would NEVER start that "nasty habit"...yet look who did. It's easy to sit there and say...Oh I will NEVER, but I'll be curious just how many of you youngins change your tune by the time you hit my age.

Never say Never, because you don't have a clue what the future has instore for you.

I hope many of you don't ever start, but I bet at least 50% of those who are ridiculing smoking now will smoke eventually (if they dont already and are just afraid of being bashed in this forum)

exactly...

I've had a lot of advice from teachers about what smoking does to your body throughout elementary and middle school, including a disgusting picture of what smoking has done to people in different parts of the body. So by the time I was 14, I was totally against it and I thought I'd never touch a cigarette in my life.

However, it didn't take too much time till I did start having the occasional smoke. Stupid? Well, I don't agree that grades at school have anything to do with intelligence, but if they do, I've been getting straight As throughout my life and smoking hasn't changed anything. Low self-esteem/wrong friends? I have plenty of friends, some that smoke, some that don't (in about a 50/50 ratio). They're all part of the same "group", showing that we respect our own choices and are aware that you can't judge a person by the choices they make.

Just because I've been taught of it doesn't make much of a difference to what I choose to do in the future, and as dasturbd pointed out, you'll all have tried one by the time you're 17/18 and some of you may have taken it up. Obviously I'm not encouraging it and rather have you not start at all. I'm justing saying that you shouldn't rule out the possibility that you might.

Back to the question I asked before - how would you propose to stop people smoking? Educate them so that they understand the consequences? I understand the consequences and probably know just as much as any of you, if not more. So what was wrong with me?