Smoking

[emjay]

Never saw any value in lighting a fire under my nose for the privilege of smelling like a cat's arse and dying early.

Boru

For me, as for many others I'd assume, it was peer pressure and thinking it was cool, that started me smoking at 15, and then, like I said, various delusional beliefs that maintained that addiction for over twenty years after that. Now that I'm free of it, the thing that angers me most is how it is and was targeted at young people, same with vaping. So in my ideal world, if smoking/vaping has to remain legal, I'd at least want the age it could be purchased raised to maybe 25 or something... so that people could make a truly informed choice, not influenced at all by immature social pressures. As I understand it, the smoking age in Britain is 18 now, when it used to be 16; that's definitely an improvement, but I still think 18 is way too young, because I think those sorts of social pressures are or can be still very influential at that age. I think if the age were raised to something like 25, then it would all but stamp out the uptake of smoking/vaping in this and future generations, not just from the point of people being more mentally mature so as to make informed decisions, but also it's much harder for young people to pass for 25 than it is for them to pass for 18, when trying to buy it in a shop.