by Tyler Fransen

   As someone who’s never smoked a cigarette in his life, I find it hard to imagine why someone would ever want to try it in the first place. I grew up in an education system where we were taught from a very young age that smoking kills and that we should never do it.

   That thought process continued through middle school and high school, reinforced by taking all of those health classes that taught you basically everything was bad for you. I can give you the entire curriculum of my health classes that spanned from fifth grade to tenth grade in one sentence: smoking, drinking, drugs and unprotected sex are bad, so don’t do them and also eat healthful.

   For years I never even touched a cigarette, and I was subconsciously taught to vilify every smoker I saw. If I ever saw someone with a cigarette my subconscious brain thought either that person had failed at life, or that person had an uncontrollable addiction that at any minute would kill them and that their life and death only served as a warning to others not to smoke.

   This train of thought, while making me never want to start smoking and be somewhat healthier for it, is not only inaccurate but dangerous. If I see a smoker and automatically think their life is worth nothing but a reminder not to smoke, that dehumanizes them.

   When we dehumanize people over something as trivial as what they do in their spare time, it can lead to more dangerous ways of thinking about someone, like on the basis of their race or their sexuality. It paints parts of humanity with too broad a brush.

   Smokers are humans; humans with a vice. I know all too much about vices, just ask my grocery bill.

   In an effort to understand why people started smoking and humanize what I once thought was inhuman, I went around and asked two different students about their smoking habits. One student, who currently smokes, is named Timothy Bowers.

   Bowers says he began smoking around the age of 15 and was doing it mostly as a social activity with his friends.

   He tried to quit once when he went overseas to do military contracting work.

   “I started using those vapor smokes with just the nicotine in them,” he said and added that after three weeks he wasn’t smoking cigarettes at all and only used the vapor smokes four to five times a day.

   But then he was unable to obtain the vaporized nicotine due to a new rule put in place by what Bowers calls, “some [expletive] general” saying that contractors would not get mailing privileges anymore. This made him unable to order new cartridges for his vapor smokes; the only other source of nicotine Bowers was able to obtain were cigarettes. “It started back up slowly,” he said, “[from] one or two a day to smoking regularly again.”

   Nowhere in Bower’s story do we hear a tale of desperation for smoking or some sort of failure at life. He served his country and only started smoking because his friends were doing it and he thought he’d join in.

   Now yes, the moms of the world will say, “If your friends jumped off a cliff would you do that too?” To which the answer, of course, is no. But Bower’s story isn’t one of, ‘I was peer pressured and forced to smoke,’ it was, ‘My friends were doing it and I wanted to do it too.’

   The other student I interviewed is currently in the process of quitting and hasn’t had a cigarette since June.

   Becky Wright began smoking regularly when she was 14. Puffing, she said, “roughly a pack a week or so until I was in my twenties.” The most she would smoke Wright said, “was out at parties, or when I would go out, maybe smoke a half a pack of cigarettes in a night. It was gross.”

   Both Wright and Bowers started smoking at a young age, which according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is decreasing across the nation. The CDC’s website states, “About nine of every 100 high school students (9.3 percent) reported in 2015 that they smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days—a decrease from 15.8 percent in 2011.”

   The fact remains that smoking is a dangerous habit, both Bowers and Wright will attest to it. Wright even said that a family friend of hers had been diagnosed with emphysema, caused by smoking, that deteriorated his lung tissue so much he was rendered ineligible for a lung transplant.

   We also need to bear in mind, however, that people (like myself) and their perceptions of how others started smoking and why they continue to smoke, shouldn’t be taken as absolute.

   It doesn’t make you a bad person or a peer pressured teen if you start smoking, especially at a young age. Some people just try it because their friends are doing it or they’re at a party.

   I don’t want people to die of smoking related deaths, and I definitely don’t want people to start smoking only to become addicted later. But I also don’t want people to think that just because they started smoking and made that choice in their life that they are somehow not like the rest of us.

   Smokers are human. How, why and when they started smoking is not what is important. Just because someone does something potentially detrimental to their health does not make them a bad person; it just makes them a person with a bad habit.